Yeah, Well Could Chat GPT Do THIS?!
Probably -- but also, maybe not?
It’s been over a month since the AI Barbie trend took over my algorithm – and yours, too, I bet – and I’m still thinking about it.
I didn’t partake at the time, because I have complicated feelings about AI. I don’t think we should use it for things we have, up to now, used artists for; I worry about the environmental impact of asking Chat GPT what we should have for lunch; I’m concerned about the effects AI videos of sharks and coral reefs and ageing celebrities have on older and younger people specifically – people who are not especially literate when it comes to online media and discerning fact from fiction; and, lower down the list of concerns, but there all the same, is my discomfort with the kind of bland sameness AI seems to present us with, and that’s without getting into its issues with homogenising race, gender and body type.
There’s also the massive problem of AI in education; a recent New York magazine feature detailed the ways college students are increasingly using ChatGPT to complete their assignments. Out of 1,000 students surveyed, more than 90% of them admitted to using AI to assist with their coursework.
It’s not just the students, either – a student at Northeastern College is applying to have their tuition fees returned after catching their professor using ChatGPT to create course notes.
I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t have used it myself, when I was a student; I studied Italian and English in my undergraduate degree, and did an MA in International Journalism, and I can think of myriad ways AI would have made my life at third level easier.
As a teenager and twenty-something, I would, undoubtedly, have been only delighted to farm some of the more tiresome aspects of my college work out to a bot; as a 40-year-old, I now understand the importance of doing those assignments myself. What impact would using AI have had on the knowledge and skills I gained from my third-level experience? Not a positive one, I’d wager.
I used Chat GPT for the first time the other day, to ask for topic suggestions for my podcast, inspired by an episode of Miss Me (a podcast I’m having increasingly complicated feelings about, as it happens*) wherein a listener suggested they ask AI to script an episode for them. The presenters – the singer Lily Allen and TV and radio presenter Miquita Oliver – refused, but the seed was sown, in my brain at least.
To be entirely fair (to Chat GPT, an AI programme that has no feelings about the concept of fairness as applied to it I’m sure), its responses were pretty decent. It suggested we talk about Irishness in an American context; try eating and grading American snacks; discuss whether or not we’d be friends with one another if we weren’t sisters.
But the suggestions were all very general; the specificity of our episode topics – in one (linked above), we discuss how we should be dead, based on a variety of stupid things we’ve done; in another, what niche content I could offer on my OnlyFans account (we settled on squashing porridge beneath my bare feet) – seemed somehow too weird, too personal, for Chat GPT to grasp.
This is, I think, the biggest philosophical problem with AI (as opposed to the practical problems: that it’s stealing our jobs and using up all of our resources LOL): it’s unable to get to the crux of what it is to be human, what it is to think and to feel and to laugh and to cry.
What it can do is summarise and assess and deduct and calculate; I heard a news item this morning in which the journalist surmised that, within the next decade, we’ll no longer have need of radiologists, because that’s a job AI will be able to do excellently. We’ll probably also be able to use it to grade maths and language tests; to summarise research studies and surveys.
It might be able to do the most basic work of architects, at least architects whose job it is to design low-cost housing, for example, or high-rise office blocks. I’m not under any illusions that AI will be replacing the Frank Lloyd Wrights of the world, or the Antoni Gaudís.
ChatGPT could probably do basic news reporting; translate kids’ books into other languages; identify and analyse trends in high schoolers’ grades; drive buses and cars along established routes in perfect road and traffic conditions (another LOL); plan out average-looking garden beds for disinterested homeowners; come up with workout plans for busy 9-to-5ers to do in their home gyms.
But it won’t be able to illustrate those same kids’ books (check out the swathe of recent AI-generated kids’ books and TV shows to see the true horrors of AI, the sheer sameness of artificially rendered “art”); pilot planes in imperfect conditions; predict human behaviour in any kind of nuanced, detailed way; write an essay about the emotional impact of reading Life of Pi for the first time, or Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (while we’re at it, nor would it be able to write either of those books); or design Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny.
Not to mention THE BAD ART! Where would we be without bad art – which AI is trained not to do?! Remember this failed restoration of poor beleaguered Jesus (hasn’t he been through enough?!)? AI could never come up with the critically panned Sussudio, the roundly derided True by Spandau Ballet, Emily in Paris, Jupiter Ascending or Sex and the City 2, the world’s worst movie.
It seems unnecessary to point out that the world would be a far, far poorer place without these additions to popular culture, however terrible they may (objectively) be. (FYI neither Sussudio nor True are actually terrible, which is why the art of criticism, which is subjective by nature, must be preserved, or, in other words, ChatGPT could never be a critic, either!)
I’m also thinking about the world of kind of… awkward art, art that explains the human condition in a way that is awful and embarrassing and relatable. Films like Juno and Frances Ha, TV shows like Girls and The Office, where central characters are lovable and loathsome at the same time, relatable and ridiculous, awkward and sophisticated. Could AI conceive of such contradictions?
I’m thinking, too, of my own book, This is Not About You, a memoir which – if you haven’t read it – details my own life through a series of romantic (or not-so-romantic) entanglements. It shows me taking two steps forward and four steps back; coming to conclusions from which I learn absolutely zero lessons; making the same decisions, over and over, and expecting different results, in ways which, I think, are very, very human but make no logical sense and will never be “understood” or “interpreted” by a computer as anything other than confusing, illogical choices that have no real purpose or possible positive outcome.
I think the development of AI is a positive one, overall; I think it will be an incredibly useful tool for mathematicians and physicists, for surgeons and astronauts, for accountants and statisticians and all of the myriad fields that involve logic and maths and probabilities and drilling down into facts and figures to reach with broad, measurable conclusions.
But for the magic of everyday life – for the joy and the sublime, the farce and the satire, the heartbreak and the bitter pill of failure – the colour of it all, how can we ever expect artificial intelligence to grasp the intricacies of it? (And why would we ever want it to?)
*It might just be that I am too attuned to the concept of triggers and sensitivity when it comes to specific issues (usually weight and fatphobia, and violence against women) – but a recent episode in which Allen and Oliver discussed their own weights and body sizes seemed particularly careless, especially in a moment where Oliver declared that they had both “been all sizes”, then went into detail bemoaning a time she was an 8, rather than a 4, a time she frequently refers to on the show as when she was “fat”. Objectively speaking – and, to reiterate here in case this is in question, “fat” is not a feeling – neither of these women has ever experienced the world as a fat person.
P.P.S.I’m currently reading John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis, a book I would most likely never have picked up, were it not the choice for my upcoming book club, and my mind has been blown several times.
The thing I just can’t stop thinking about? That 117 billion people have lived on this earth, and 100 billion of those lived before the year 1804. Which means that all of the developments that have come about since then — antibiotics, anesthetic, space travel, air travel, the internet, contraception, the concept of boundaries — have come about in just a fraction of humanity’s time on earth. What the fuck were the rest of them doing with themselves?!?
P.P.S. CMAT’s new song, Take a Sexy Picture of Me, is out and it is so, so good. I can’t stop thinking about the very last line, in a good but also bad way. Ain’t that life though?!? (Could Chat GPT write that very bad last line? I think not.)