What are my words worth?
When I first used ChatGPT, one of my first unprompted thoughts, quite selfishly, was to be thankful that I had a number of articles and documents written before any AI even remotely gained the ability to do it. I had a portfolio of writing before the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) so I wouldn’t have to keep defending the provenance of my words forever.
Even before I could formulate it in words, I’ve had this vague, sinking feeling every time I interacted with an LLM over the last few months. This isn’t right, my brain told me, you’re not talking to a human. You don’t have to say please and thank you and be polite, it’s a program. But I couldn’t do it, it’s more engaging, patient, smarter, and kinder than many humans I’ve interacted with in forums online. And that’s when I realized something. Until some point in time last year, if we saw text anywhere, we implicitly knew a human must’ve written them, there was just no alternative. But from now and until the day the human race ends, there will always be the doubt: who’s doing the talking? Are these your thoughts? Or am I speaking to an AI?
It’s not yet a societal issue, since not all people currently see its potential or face its effects. If they do use it, they’re critical of the flaws in the system, proud that they can spot fakes. But I have to say, before November ’22 when ChatGPT was released, AI was just an amusement to most, the bumbling antics of Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa compounding this. They were like the shiny robot puppies of the 2000s, wonderfully silly but nothing more. But now, everything has changed, AI is everywhere, offering to do the writing for you, clamouring to reduce your brain’s labours.
Even as I type this on Notion, I’m a single forward slash (/) away from accessing an AI that can write this entire article for me and make it more intelligent than I could ever hope to make it. It understands linguistics and esoteric philosophy from 2000 years ago, how can I compete?
And yes, I use the word “understands” consciously even though I know that’s not what it’s doing. Why do we suddenly care about the circumstances of the writer? We’ve been communicating through blocks of text with disembodied agents since the dawn of the internet and even that of writing itself, and we’ve certainly never cared about the humanity of the writer. The words were what have always indicated the intelligence, empathy, and a thousand other human characteristics of the writer and they continue to do so now. The fact that the words come from an AI is irrelevant if it can comfort someone going through a tough time or give financial advice to someone on the brink of losing their money. For the first time in history, we have an intelligent, all-knowledgeable agent that has no angle — no love, passion, hatred, greed, kindness, empathy, or any emotion influencing it. It’s just intelligent for the sake of being intelligent.
So… what are my words worth? I can feed an outline to an AI and get it to write this entire article to specifically cater to the reading ability of my target demographic. It could correct mistakes, fix my awkward phrasing at times, and so much more. And I can’t even make the argument that it would rob my writing of its tone. All I have to do is feed it my old works and it would precisely mimic my tone to a level beyond human perfection, with none being the wiser.
So I feel as if my words are no longer a strong indicator of my humanity or intelligence when I could fake it in seconds with AI.
The ideas I have, thankfully, are still valuable. But only for now. I already see that LLMs have the uncanny ability to put 2 and 2 together to come up with a million. They will, at some point, surpass a human’s ability to create planned chaos from order, and isn’t that what creativity is? The only thing we can do better is to test our hypotheses and draw on past experience to validate ideas. But when you give these models some mechanism to remember past experience and the agency to act in real-world systems… who can compete?
So… what are my words — these words — worth? What do they mean? What do they indicate? I have no clue. None.
But I do feel the need to write more, now more than ever, and ensure we don’t give up our voices and stay quiet now that there’s a smarter kid on the block.