In my last post, I have elaborated on the disturbing consequences of AI, with a focus on deep fake videos. My purpose of this post was to go into the entertainment functions of ChatGPT. However, while writing it, some concerns came up to me.
Everybody knows that ChatGPT has an answer to (almost) everything. You forgot what Socrates’ beliefs were? ChatGPT gives you an overview. You want a good recommendation for a restaurant when you are on holiday in Italy? ChatGPT has one. You are looking for a recipe with zucchini and potatoes? ChatGPT will provide one.
However, I am asking myself if we should ask everything to ChatGPT. Why don’t we look anything up in a book anymore? You can have entire conversations with AI-robots. Will this lead to a society in which people will find it more and more difficult to speak to somebody in person? Think about all the (young) people nowadays that have a fear of calling. Will new generations still be able to think for themselves, or will they rely on AI?
On the other side, I am wondering if we make use of ChatGPT enough. I think ChatGPT has much more to offer than we use it for. For example, I asked ChatGPT if I could play a game with it. ChatGPT gave me a few options: trivia, riddles, word games, or something I came up with. I asked for the riddles, and ChatGPT repeated itself after the second riddle. However, the riddles were not standard, I haven’t heard from them before.
Furthermore, I asked the tool to create a short humorous story about a weasel living in Rotterdam. Within seconds, a well written funny story was created (see below). While I am amazed how you can experiment with ChatGPT, I also think it decreases people’s creativity. Furthermore, readers are able to see the differences between a text made by ChatGPT or by a human being. However, as ChatGPT will keep evolving, in a few years, the texts made by ChatGPT may become undistinguishable from “real” texts. Therefore, the question might rise, whether ChatGPT will take over the work from writers in a few years?
What do you think? Is ChatGPT just a great contribution? We can learn a lot from it, and it can make our life easier, for example by simply telling what store to go to. Or does it also decreases our creativity and independence? In the end, are we able to be entertained without ChatGPT and other AI tools?
