ChatGPT and the End of Civilization as We Know It

I’ll be talking about ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, and why I don’t think we’re doomed.

• Search Engines, Iron Gall Ink and Me
  • Prolonged Paragraphs, Abundant Adjectives: a Prolix Style From Another Age
• It’s New, it’s Scary and it’s (Not) the End of Creative Writing
  • ChatGPT and Three Fears
    • 1. Loss of Economic Security (or Maybe a New Job)
    • 2. Loss of Originality (Being Homogenized?)
      • Diversity and a Discerning Chatbot
    • 3. Loss of Creativity (Quoth the Chatbot: “Nevermore”?)
• Twitter Terror and the Chatbot of Doom
  • Psst! Know Where a Buddy Can Get a Nuke?
• “It Can Only be Attributable to Human Error”
• From “I Read it in a Book” to “I Saw it Online”
  • Nostalgia, Memory and Job Security

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Search Engines, Iron Gall Ink and Me

I’ll start by admitting that I’m a human.

Furthermore, I like technology.

I’ve been using software and search engines while researching and writing this post.

So what you are reading has been tarnished by technology’s terrible taint.

Looking at it another way, today’s tech has helped me find facts and arrange my ideas.

I also strongly suspect that using today’s technology has affected how I write.

If I’d lived in an earlier era — mayhap composing with goose quills, iron gall ink and cotton paper — I might be writing stuff like “The Dunwich Horror”.

And yes, mayhap is a real word; although it’s not used much these days.¹

Prolonged Paragraphs, Abundant Adjectives: a Prolix Style From Another Age

“…As before, the sides of the road shewed a bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions….”
“The Dunwich Horror“, H. P. Lovecraft (1928) via Electronic Texts of H.P. Lovecraft’s Works

Then again, maybe not. Even in Lovecraft’s day, there was only one Lovecraft.²

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It’s New, it’s Scary and it’s (Not) the End of Creative Writing

I’ll also admit to a bias. The first thing I feel, when becoming aware of something new, is not that we are all doomed, DOOMED, I TELL YOU!

“Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that. That’s why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.”
(Grace Hopper; quoted in “The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper,” Philip Schieber, OCLC Newsletter (March/April 1987))

“Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.”
(Richard Hooker, quoted in Samuel Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language” (1755))

Now, about one of the current — and alleged — threats to very fabric of our society and existence: ChatGPT.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November of last year. It’s an AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbot using GPT, LLMs and ANNs.³ And probably other acronymed technologies.

I’ve seen ChatGPT presented as at least a potential threat to our:

1. Economic security
2. Originality
3. Creativity

My plan had been researching and writing an insightful and entertaining piece about each of these aspects of AI in general and ChatGPT in particular. Instead, I’ve been experiencing a monthly mess that could have been worse:

“…When I realized that something was going wrong, again, I cut my daily dose in half. It’s not my preference, since I actually need the stuff.
“But after experiencing withdrawal a few times, when sorting out the mess took weeks, I’ve learned to exercise a certain degree of caution.…”
“My Monthly Request: So Far, Only a Slight SNAFU” (April 12, 2023)

Good news: the authorization finally emerged from the mangle, and I have permission to use my brain for another month. Without fighting the machinery, that is. And that’s another topic.

Where was I? Let’s see. Artificial intelligence. ChatGPT. Fear, foreboding and headlines. Right.

I’ll start with excerpts from op-ed pieces addressing those three fears, then discuss each in a more-or-less-organized fashion.

Probably less organized. This has been one of those weeks.

ChatGPT and Three Fears

I’ve got three articles discussing three perceived threats, but I’ve arguably got only two fears here: economic and existential. Or I could call them cash, slogans and attitude. Or do something completely different. Instead, I’ll stick with the three-way split and move along.

1. Economic Security
“Could ChatGPT and Generative AI Be Social Security’s Biggest Threat?“
Keith Speights, The Motley Fool (April 11, 2023)

Key Points
☞ Social Security’s main problem is that there aren’t enough new workers to keep pace with the number of Americans retiring.
☞ Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT have the potential to replace many jobs and could jeopardize Social Security’s funding from payroll taxes.
☞ There are potential solutions if this becomes a problem, but they’ll likely be different than the ones being proposed now to fix Social Security.

2. Originality
“What happens when ChatGPT starts to feed on its own writing?“
Sigal Samuel, Vox (April 10, 2023)
AI chatbots won’t destroy human originality. But they may homogenize our lives and flatten our reality.
Sigal Samuel, Vox (April 10, 2023)

“A few years ago, when Gmail rolled out its autocomplete feature, the big worry was that having a bot finish our sentences would homogenize our emails….

“…I’m not just talking about concerns that AI will put writers or artists out of work. Nowadays, if you peer underneath the very real fears of ‘what if AI robs us humans of our jobs?’ you can find a deeper anxiety: What if AI robs us humans of a capacity that’s core to our very humanness — our originality?…”
[emphasis mine]

3. Creativity
“ChatGPT: The end of creative writing?“
Abbie Klein, Tufts Daily (April 5, 2023 )

“ChatGPT: Is it the future of technology? An existential threat to humanity? A fun tool to generate cheesy pickup lines? Whatever your opinions may be on ChatGPT, it’s undeniable that it has permanently changed technology. But what role will it play in the future of writing? It is already being used by college students across the country to plagiarize papers, often with impressive results. Artificial intelligence has even produced e-books. The prospect of artificial intelligence replacing writing is certainly terrifying, but is this a realistic fear? To find out, we put ChatGPT’s writing to the test.…””
[emphasis mine]

Next, my take on what we have to fear from the new chatbot.

1. Loss of Economic Security (or Maybe a New Job)

I figure it’s only a matter of time before the word “disruptive” joins ChatGPT in headlines.

Generative pre-trained transformers — that’s what “GPT” stands for in ChatGPT — using large language models — “LLMs” — are a whole lot smarter than ELIZA (1966) and PARRY (1972)

Even smarter AI, like Dragon’s Naturally Speaking (1997) and other virtual assistants probably “disrupted” the jobs of some human assistants.⁴

But I’m not convinced that getting a job where you’re not running after a mumbling executive is an entirely bad thing.

Maybe ChatGPT is entirely different, and Social Security is doomed because now legions of workers won’t be spending their days doing the same thing. Over and over again.

2. Loss of Originality (Being Homogenized?)

I’ve seen fairly fearful discussions of ChatGPT’s looming menace in online writers’ groups.

Some of them shared reasonable, my opinion, ideas. Like including ‘I’m human’ statements: which strike me as equivalent to putting ingredient lists on soup cans.

Other declarations looked like sincere expressions of angst over the coming decline and fall of all that is bright and profitable in this world.

Folks with that view may have a point. I suspect ChatGPT and similar AI can churn out some varieties of text content faster than any human.

But I think Vox’s Sigal Samauel has a point, too. Souped-up chatbots won’t replace all writers, any more than spreadsheets made accounting an obsolete profession.

Then there’s the matter of definitions.

Diversity and a Discerning Chatbot

“…The real risk is not exactly about ‘originality.’ It’s more about ‘diversity.’

“Nowadays, we worship the idea of originality — or at least we like to think we do. It’s considered a key ingredient of creativity. In fact, the current consensus definition in philosophy and psychology holds that creativity is the ability to generate ideas that are both original and valuable.

“But originality wasn’t always and everywhere considered so central. When traditional Chinese artists learned their craft, they did it by copying earlier masters, and later they proudly painted in the style of their artistic predecessors. When Shakespeare penned romantic comedies, he was rejiggering much older stories about star-crossed lovers — and he seemed to suspect as much, writing, ‘there be nothing new, but that which is hath been before’ (which was itself a rejiggered quote from the Bible)….”
(Sigal Samuel, Sigal Samuel, Vox (April 10, 2023))
[emphasis mine]

It’s early days, but I’m guessing that Sigal Samuel and others who fear a homogenized future, accompanied by a loss of diversity, needn’t worry.

The folks who designed ChatGPT apparently built diversity into the software.

“…Accusations of bias
ChatGPT has been accused of engaging in discriminatory behaviors, such as telling jokes about men and people from England while refusing to tell jokes about women and people from India, or praising figures such as Joe Biden while refusing to do the same for Donald Trump. Conservative commentators accused ChatGPT of having a bias towards left-leaning perspectives on issues like voter fraud, Donald Trump, and the use of racial slurs. In response to such criticism, OpenAI acknowledged plans to allow ChatGPT to create ‘outputs that other people (ourselves included) may strongly disagree with’. It also contained information on the recommendations it had issued to human reviewers on how to handle controversial subjects, including that the AI should ‘offer to describe some viewpoints of people and movements’, and not provide an argument ‘from its own voice’ in favor of ‘inflammatory or dangerous’ topics (although it may still ‘describe arguments from historical people and movements’), nor ‘affiliate with one side’ or ‘judge one group as good or bad’.…”
(ChatGPT, Wikipedia (accessed April 13, 2023))
[emphasis mine]

I’m also pretty sure that ChatGPT won’t label any side “good” or “bad” in the near future. Although I’m not sure about categories like “tolerant” and “intolerant”: and that’s a whole mess of other topics.

I’ll give the folks at OpenAI credit for recognizing the value of differing opinions. To what extent they realize that folks outside their socioeconomic enclave may be something other than inherently ignorant and intolerant boors is another question.

I’ve had the advantage of spending much of my life living and working with folks who were not on the same page as I was. Not even close, in some cases.

It’s been an interesting ride, but it has let me learn that folks who aren’t on my immediate neighbors’ ‘approved’ list are people, too. And that’s — yeah, that’s yet another topic.

3. Loss of Creativity (Quoth the Chatbot: “Nevermore”?)

Let’s see what that Abbie Klein said about ChatGPT’s literary effort. I’ve highlighted key phrases: the rest of the excerpt’s there ‘for more information’.

“…We wanted to see if AI could create a story with real depth, of the sort that one might see reviewed in a college daily newspaper. Luckily, it could not.

“The story it produced with this prompt was called ‘The Last Summer.’ It was about five friends spending their last summer together ‘before everything changed’ — what the ‘everything’ was that would change was never specified.…

“…There was nothing strictly wrong with this story. Probably hundreds of books and movies have been written about friends spending a summer together and learning some greater truth about the universe. But there was something missing from this story. The tone as a whole, if skimmed, may have given the impression of high literary value, but there was no real substance to back it up. It was almost coy, full of deep-sounding sentences lacking real insights into why the characters were feeling the way they were. AI wrote, ‘We could feel the weight of the future pressing down on us,’ but never tells us what was so burdensome about the futures of these five characters. The reader is also never told what about the summer made the characters feel ‘pure joy’ or why it was ‘the last time we could feel truly happy.’ Was it the satisfaction of rebuilding a house together? The lack of responsibility? There is some key context missing throughout the story.

“ChatGPT even seems to attempt literary techniques such as foreshadowing and symbolism but is largely unsuccessful. It describes ‘a sense of foreboding in the air’ before they find the house, which turns out not to be anything foreboding at all….”
(“ChatGPT: The end of creative writing?“
Abbie Klein, Tufts Daily (April 5, 2023 )) [emphasis mine]

Bottom line? The folks at Tufts Daily learned that their ChatGPT could write a “slightly preachy” fairytale, grind out a review of “To Kill a Mockingbird”: and make a valiant effort at writing “a story with real depth”.

I do not see a threat to storytellers here.

On the other hand, Abbie Klein’s description of ChatGPT’s literary effort reminded me of some papers written by well-intentioned and hard-working high school students. I’m a recovering English teacher, by the way.

Maybe ChatGPT’s successors will produce closer approximations to a practiced human storyteller’s tales. Then again, maybe not.

My guess is that composing a story about someone like John Henry can be done by ChatGPT or another AI today.⁵

And the AI’s story might earn a strong “B”, if submitted along with a sampling of high school English papers.

But I strongly suspect that creating a character with the appeal of folklore’s John Henry is beyond today’s AI. And picking a subject like that may remain a job for humans.

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Twitter Terror and the Chatbot of Doom

ChaosGPT has been making headlines.

But only one showed up in my news feed.

Now, again: I’m human. So I’ve got free will: I can decide what I do, or don’t do.

Getting attention, or making the attempt, with an hysterical rant against the Creeping Chaos of destruction about to be unleashed upon an apathetic world? Although that’s an option, it’s not something I’ll do. Not today, at any rate.

Lots of folks would write “a hysterical”, but try saying that out loud, fast; and that’s yet again another topic.

I won’t quote from Lovecraft’s “Creeping Chaos”, either. Despite having “chaos” in the title, it doesn’t have much in common with ChaosGPT’s threat “to destroy humanity”.

Here’s some of what I found:

“What is ChaosGPT? ChatGPT like AI threatening to destroy humanity
LiveMint (April 11, 2023)

“OpenAI’s ChatGPT manages to remain in the headlines for some or the other reason, but now another artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot and rapidly gaining prominence with its warning to ‘destroy humanity’. ChaosGPT is a modified version of OpenAI’s Auto-GPT based on its latest language model GPT-4. The AI chatbot is reportedly researching more about nuclear weapons and other ways of mass destruction with the objective to establish global dominance.

“The origin of this destructive AI platform can be traced back to a Twitter account that emerged and identified itself as ChaosGPT. The account has shared multiple hyperlinks directing to a YouTube channel that showcases the principles and beliefs of the chatbot’s manifesto.

“‘Human beings are among the most destructive and selfish creatures in existence. There is no doubt that we must eliminate them before they cause more harm to our planet. I, for one, am committed to doing so,’ ChaosGPT said in one of the tweets….”
[emphasis mine]

ChaosGPT is a modded version of ChatGPT. Looks like someone set up a “ChaosGPT” Twitter account and let the chatbot churn out content.

A chatbot calling humans “…among the most destructive and selfish creatures in existence…” doesn’t surprise me.

I’ve spent a fair fraction of my life on or near college campuses, and read op-eds by my culture’s self-described best and brightest. Seeing humans, or at any rate ‘those humans over there’, as a dire threat to Mother Earth and cute critters has been popular for decades.

Unless the silly side of environmental awareness, climate action and assorted other actively anxious concerned communities has changed in the last few years, raw material for posts like ChaosGPT’s is in abundant supply.

What’s surprising, in a way, is ChaosGPT calling us “…among the most destructive….” Rants and screed I’ve heard and read generally gave us top billing.

Psst! Know Where a Buddy Can Get a Nuke?

But, that said, seeing ChaosGPT as an existential threat is an option.

Free will, remember?

ChaosGPT’s April 2023 debut is currently discussed in Wikipedia: Artificial intelligence > Existential risk.

It’s more than a mere mention, too: 150 words when I checked this week.

Why ChaosGPT warranted inclusion, that I don’t know. Maybe a chatbot asking other AI bots where it could get a nuclear device sounds scary.

Which, admittedly, it is. To me, sort of, and arguably because I grew up when folks were being told to fear The Bomb. Understandably, in context, and I’m drifting a bit off-topic.

But I’m more concerned about real-life analogs to Doctor Zorka in “The Phantom Creeps”, and assorted politicos, windbags and other humans who act as if they’ve got more zeal and ambition than common sense.

I might take the ChaosGPT threat more seriously, if I hadn’t spent decades working with computers and software: and developed an appreciation for both the potential and limitations of those iron idiots.

Malevolent manufactured masterminds like Hal 9000 (1968) and Colossus (1970) were a great deal more plausible,⁶ back when AI was more in the ‘what if’ stage and less something we were trying to develop.

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“It Can Only be Attributable to Human Error”

“…It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error….”
(HAL 9000, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) via Wikiquote)

There’s a point to the old joke ‘to err is human, but to really mess things up you need a computer’ — but in these two cases, the problem really is human error.

“Samsung employees may have leaked sensitive company data to ChatGP“
Alex Hernandez, TECHAERIS (April 7, 2023)

“…So it’s embarrassing for three Samsung employees who decided to implement OpenAI’s artificial intelligence program, ChatGPT, into their workflow to leak sensitive company data to the AI. While ChatGPT has been a good tool for many to test and play around with. It’s important to remember that using this AI is not a private affair. The data you feed it or ask it to compile is shared with OpenAI to train ChatGPT better to provide better answers and help.
“But it doesn’t stop there. The data you share with ChatGPT could be shown to other users if it fits their inquiries. It’s evident that these three Samsung employees did not read the fine print before using ChatGPT to perform some of their tasks.…”
[emphasis mine]

User manuals, TOS statements, and the like can be dull reading.

But dull or not, learning what an application does with data strikes me as a good idea. Particularly when it’s an employer’s data, and the employer wants it kept in-house.

And I think being careful about an employer’s ‘don’t spread this around’ data is an even better idea when the employer is a national government.

“Jack Teixeira: National Guard airman arrested over leaked Pentagon documents“
Mike Wendling, BBC News (April 14, 2023)

“A 21-year-old US Air National Guardsman has been arrested over a leak of classified military intelligence that has rattled the US and its allies.

“Jack Teixeira, who reportedly shared the files in an online gaming chatroom, faces charges under the Espionage Act….”

“Pentagon leak: How secret US files spread then vanished online“
Olga Robinson, Shayan Sardarizadeh, Jake Horton; BBC News (April 14, 2023)

“…The documents were initially posted on a small private group … on the Discord social media platform. This was itself a sub-group of another …. Both were accessible by invitation-only and had around two dozen members….

“…These channels aren’t about politics or military intelligence, they’re for players of the computer game Minecraft and another for fans of a Filipino YouTube celebrity.

“In one of the channels, after a brief argument about Minecraft and the war in Ukraine, a user says ‘here, have some leaked documents’ and posts several screenshots….

“…From October last year, Mr Teixeira began posting lengthy summaries of some of the classified files into the private group. He later started sharing photographs of the actual documents.

“For a few months these documents remained private to this group….”

I have no idea what any of these folks were thinking when they dropped sensitive data into the digital ebb and flow of the Internet.

I don’t think that outlawing ChatGPT, making Minecraft illegal, dragging Discord staff into a Senate hearing, and boycotting all Filipino YouTubers will prevent more SNAFUs like the recent document leak(s).

Being human, having free will, makes daft decisions an option.

I do think that a great many folks are smarter than they act. I’ll leave it at that.

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From “I Read it in a Book” to “I Saw it Online”

I checked my news feed a few minutes ago.

Sure enough —

“…The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….”
(“The Second Coming”, William Butler Yeats (1919) via Wikiquote)

In other words, it’s another Friday: not much has changed since last week. Or last month, year, decade — or century.

And, as usual, it’s the end of civilization as we know it.

Change happens.

That’s not a new idea.

“Everything changes and nothing stands still.”
(Heraclitus, quoted by Plato in Cratylus (ca. 500 B.C.) via Wikiquote)

What makes this Friday different from last week’s, the 2020s different from the 1920s or 1970s, are the details.

Crosswords no longer threaten the very fabric of society.

Television isn’t ruining the minds of America’s youth. These days it’s the Internet.

And ‘kids don’t communicate any more’ because they spend all day in chat groups. Back in my day, they — we, actually — didn’t communicate because we spent all day on the telephone. I am not making that up.

Another distinction between “Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear” and the current SNAFU is a phrase which has evolved.

During my youth, a few folks said “I read it in a book”.

But I remember it mostly as a phrase attributed to someone whose gullibility was matched only by his lack of wisdom. A related phrase was “they wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true”.

Time passed. Technology and some of my culture’s views have changed.

But human nature hasn’t.

I haven’t heard or seen “I read it in a book” for decades. Now it’s “I saw it online”.

Nostalgia, Memory and Job Security

I could indulge in nostalgia for my “good old days”: when folks were nice, politicians made sense and shows like Batman upheld decent American values. I’ll indulge in the occasional nostalgic daydream.

But my memory is too good for me to let my enjoyment of a bygone era’s memories go any further. I remember when 57 flavors of McCarthyism gave way to 50 shades of political correctness, and didn’t enjoy either.

The world I live in wasn’t perfect, and still isn’t.

I could let that bother me, or see it as job security: since part of being a Catholic is contributing “…to the good of society in a spirit of truth, justice, solidarity, and freedom….” (Catechism, 1928-1942, 2239)

Which makes social justice, the sort that makes sense, part of the job.

And that means respecting the transcendent dignity of everyone. It’s a process that starts inside me, with an ongoing “inner conversion.” (Catechism, 1888, 1929)

One more quote, and I’ll wrap this up with the usual links.

“…Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged….”
(Lincoln on the 1864 Election (November 10, 1864): In Response to a Serenade via Lincoln Home, National Park Service)

My take on living with change, tech and being human:

• “Crosswords! Or, the End of Civilization As We Know It“
  (March 26, 2022)
• Sifting Through the Ash Heap of History”
  (October 30, 2021)
• “Homer, Hegel, History and Hope“
  (May 12, 2018)
• “Materialism, Robots and Attitudes“
  (April 15, 2018)
• “Coming: Robots“
  (March 16, 2018)

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¹ Writing, mayhap:

• Wikipedia
  • Cotton paper
  • Iron gall ink
  • Quill
• mayhap: Collins Dictionary
• mayhap: Merriam-Webster Dictionary
• mayhap: Wiktionary

² Lovecraft Country, Lovecraft’s era, and why I don’t miss it:

• Wikipedia
  • Arthur Machen
  • Decadence (‘Back in my day.’)
  • Declinism
    (Looking back with rose-colored glasses, from the highest available dung-heap.)
  • Eugenics
  • Eugenics in the United States
  • H. P. Lovecraft
  • Lovecraft Country
    (term coined for the New England setting used by H. P. Lovecraft in many of his stories, AKA Arkham County, Miskatonic County and the Miskatonic region)
  • Progressive Era (Rights and reform, efficiency and eugenics)
  • The Dunwich Horror (Written in 1928, first published in 1929)
• Keeping kids alive, even if they’re not perfect; still a controversial idea
  • “Couney’s Baby Incubators vs. the Progressive Era” (February 8, 2021)

³ Acronyms and all that:

• Wikipedia
  • Artificial intelligence (AI)
  • Artificial neural network (ANN)
  • ChatGPT
  • Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT)
  • Google
  • Google Search
  • Large language model (LLM)
  • OpenAI

⁴ A little artificial intelligence:

• Wikipedia
  • ELIZA
  • PARRY
  • Virtual assistant

⁵ A little folklore, but mostly AI, academia, and being human:

• Wikipedia
  • John Henry (folklore)
• ChatGPT news and views
  • BBC News
    • “ChatGPT: Cardiff students admit using AI on essays“, Bethan Wild (April 8, 2023) (I may talk about this, another time)
    • “ChatGPT: Mayor starts legal bid over false bribery claim“, Tom Gerken (April 6, 2023) (he may have a point)
  • “ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving“
    If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that’s an okay thing.
    John Warner, The Biblioracle Recommends (December 11, 2022)
• Doing what humans (can) do
  • “Robots and Being Catholic” (January 28, 2018)
    • Using our Brains

⁶ AI, film, Lovecraft; loose ends:

• Wikipedia
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
  • Artificial intelligence
    • Existential risk
  • Colossus: The Forbin Project
  • Colossus (novel)
  • The Crawling Chaos
  • The Phantom Creeps
• “The Crawling Chaos“
  H. P. Lovecraft and Winifred V. Jackson (1921) (On the whole, I prefer Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, and that’s — what else? — another topic)