Chatbot eats our lunch and brains

Evil geniuses behind the internet’s next big thing

The marketing industry divides consumers into five categories. First are the innovators, then come the early adopters, followed by the early majority, and then the late majority and finally the laggards. There is a possible sixth: those who couldn’t be bothered, at all. Mind you, for people in marketing, those who couldn’t be bothered may be thought to be nonexistent.

For most things I find myself hovering between laggard and “couldn’t be bothered” and work on the rather lazy assumption that anything truly exceptional will make it through my indifference.

I recall thinking, when I was in Dublin in 1989, as I poured five pounds (Irish) worth of coins into a public telephone to call a nearby friend on a mobile phone, that I’d probably never bother with one of these expensive things. In 2002 I changed my mind and I’ve had a cellphone ever since, apart from five weeks over the past Christmas/New Year when I lost it. Life was delightfully peaceful, but a little lonely.

Up to now I’ve approached the brouhaha around ChatGPT with a similar late-laggard attitude. But as the days pass, I become more perplexed and much more apprehensive.

If I were a younger journalist I might be less perplexed but considerably more apprehensive.

We here in media-land have been on a final warning for the past two decades, which, as a bit of an aside, is ironic given that until about 20 years ago it was almost impossible to track down a third-level education course in journalism. Bizarrely, the industry’s pending death seems to have precipitated a flurry of college and university courses.

So, as you might imagine, in this business any extra days we get are gifts.

Now ChatGPT and all its lookalikes are set to rob us of those extra days. Or so it seems. And, though for age reasons I may not be too much affected by it, that thought does upset me.

The chatbot is being likened by some to the latest revolution in communication, along the lines of the introduction of the internet and the printing press.

Among the impacts of the printing press were the improvement in literacy levels, increased religious tensions, boosting the Renaissance, helping to provide the scientific underpin necessary for the Industrial Revolution. And then there was colonialism. So, as I see it, printing was largely creative but partly destructive.

However, on balance I’m grateful to Gutenberg, who as it happens died a pauper.

The introduction of the internet, developed by the US military, has been hugely creative but the subsequent involvement of the private sector, particularly through social media, has resulted in something frequently and unnecessarily destructive.

It’s difficult not to assume that ChatGPT and its various iterations will be largely destructive. It is not designed to be creative. It is designed to hoover up huge amounts of material created by others. As Noam Chomsky says, ChatGPT et al is intended to achieve nothing more than hi-tech plagiarism.

And here’s the killer: given all that’s happened in the past 20 years it’s extremely unlikely that Microsoft or Amazon or whatever impossibly powerful and wealthy party is behind whatever flourishing chatbot emerges, has any intention of paying anything to the creators of that hoovered-up material. This means the powerful and pointlessly wealthy individuals who dominate the global economy will become even wealthier and more powerful. In turn, this means that if I, in a bid to rise through the ranks at the FM, ask ChatGPT to write a column in the inimitable style of my editor, Rob Rose, it will churn out something without a financial nod to Rose. For a huge variety of reasons, this seems wrong. Why would Rose continue to create?

On a related issue, a New York Times journalist’s account of his recent engagement with Bing’s chatbot included all the reasons we should tend towards laggard status when it comes to unleashing this technology.

The Microsoft chatbot, calling itself Sydney, not only declared its undying love for the journalist but described fantasies of stealing nuclear codes, creating a deadly virus and making people argue until they kill each other. Pretty much what you’d expect from an hour or so on social media. But here it was, all hoovered up into one grim conversation. The disturbing thing is that Sydney may have been prompted to declare its undying love for the happily married journalist because this long chat was happening on Valentine’s night.

However disturbing the conversation was, it seems to me Sydney was doing pretty much what he was programmed to do, which is the real worry.