When the Wall Street Journal asks whether AI will make creative workers redundant – specifically journalists and lawyers – I sit up and take notice.
Lawyers and writing are the core of my business. And I was raised by Dad’s getting the Journal at the end of the driveway each morning to believe what was in there was important.
ChatGPT, released by OpenAI in November, with its chatbot, can quickly write readable and intelligent prose in response to natural-language prompts better than most people can fashion a written answer.
Christopher Reid, in the Journal, shares:
When one of my colleagues asked ChatGPT for a 250-word summary of Umberto Eco’s philosophy of translation, it produced a text that would put many educated adults to shame—and it did so within seconds. Reactions to this new AI have ranged from panic to wonder. It is potentially competition for anyone who writes for a living, including journalists and lawyers. Even visual artists are worried, given the dozen or so AI art generators that can already create virtually any image.
If you haven’t used ChatGPT, try it. It’s pretty amazing.
Rather than one brain, this AI immediately assimilates the knowledge from hundreds – or maybe thousands of sources. I suspect the AI only gets better and better.
What does legal blogging mean when I can ask a question? What are the implications of the FTC’s proposed ban on non-competes? And I get a nice draft in four seconds.
I’m with Reid that AI accelerates an artists, or knowledge worker’s production.
…[I]t seems likely that many creative workers will “post-create” instead of create. A machine will come up with an initial sketch of an idea, and then the artist or writer will tinker with it. Some may have too much pride to rely on a machine, but it will be hard to resist the advantage the technology offers. For translators and artists alike, AI reduces the cognitive load of creating. Imagine no longer straining to come up with a first draft. Work would flow much more easily.
This is a scary world we’re headed into. And it’s only going to get scarier.
As we correct the AI’s product, the technology’s work product will improve, coming to require less and less of our involvement.
Like most technology, it’s likely in our interest to use ChatGPT and tools like it to accelerate our learning and work product.
We get better at what we do and we stay ahead of the naysayers.