As a rising junior majoring in a field that has zero relation with STEM, I had mixed feelings about ChatGPT when it started trending after its release. To be frank, my immediate reaction was indifference. Technology has always failed to attract my attention, and ChatGPT seemed to be no different from the other technological advancements that engineering students obsessed over.
Except it did once it struck me that I was a rising junior majoring in a field that has zero relation with STEM. Junior year is the time when students begin to seriously contemplate their career paths. As much as I love international studies and political science, unfortunately, I also want a stable career with a decent salary that will be enough to make me content for the rest of my life. It hit me that instead of competing against fellow peers for that dream job, I may have to fight against that spot with a non-human – AI.
A couple of months back for an elective class, I was assigned to play around with an AI writer that automatically completes sentences and even paragraphs in a matter of seconds. The program is pretty simple. You choose a couple of must-have keywords, decide on the length of the writing, and click “Generate.”
For my first sentence, I typed down, “I like dogs.” Then, I added five random words that seemed difficult to connect in a single paragraph: “Cheetos,” “alpacas,” “poetry,” “Elon Musk,” and “dakldfjal.” With no expectation, I hit “Generate” and patiently waited for black letters to miraculously appear on its own.
Two. There were two unexpected parts that stunned me. The first one was the usage of “dakldfjal.” A part of me hoped that an error message would pop up on the screen or change the word itself to what it thinks it is like how search engines such as Google would operate. However, the AI generator somehow nailed it by creatively using “dakldfjal” as a keysmash.
The second part was the level of creativity. Since it was a piece of writing, I had expected the AI writer to generate a paragraph from prose, poetry, or even an essay if it could with those evidently nonacademic terms. To my surprise, the AI writer wrote a Twitter post that mocked what Elon Musk would have written if it were him.
Creativity was thought to be a unique trait exclusive to humans, yet the level of creativity that the AI writer demonstrated gave me a reality check that the age of human irrelevance, as Yuval Noah Harari warned, is not as far as I thought. Journalists can easily be replaced by AI journalists that digest information faster and report quicker. Screenwriters would be outcompeted by AI screenwriters that can easily conclude what media elements attract the most viewers. Lawyers, too, could be potentially tossing most of their work to fairly impartial AI legal professionals that can easily identify loopholes in logic and evidence.
W h i l e t h e a c c e l e r a t e d development of AI is exciting, we need to stay wary of the effects that it can have on our society. Like how we did not know how much of an impact the industrial revolution could have on climate change and social inequality, nobody truly knows the monumental impact unregulated implementation of AI can have.
Indeed, we love the convenience and comfort that we get from technology. However, unless politicians somehow figure out how universal basic income can be implemented in the near future, we are stuck in the never-ending cycle of exchanging money with relevant input whether that be in the form of labor, creativity, research, or strategy. Hence, while scientists are no doubt vital members of society, it is time that society fosters more individuals from humanities and social sciences to discuss how we can guide towards the right path.