Today, we had a roundtable discussion on ChatGPT and some of its implications. It was so engaging and informative that we've decided to make it a monthly thing! Thank you to everyone who attended. Particular thanks to Corinne for prompting this, and Oliver for generously sharing your AI knowledge and being such a great sounding board. Find a summary of what we discussed below.
The unknown is scary...
... and there's lots of conflicting (and confusing) information out there. In a way, AI anxiety is similar to climate anxiety, because we all know it's coming and individuals can do little to stop it. All the same, it's likely that jobs will come out of this, just like they came out of the internet... but we might not be able to foresee those jobs quite yet.
Who's doing what?
Some of us use ChatGPT daily, and some of us haven't used it at all. Here are some of the use cases for those who've dipped their toes in (or jumped all the way into the pool):
experimentation, idea generation
"tell me what to eat for dinner"
for menial coding tasks
to draft some basic copy
to confirm the identification of errors in text
"ChatGPT is like a Junior Programmer: sometimes they make mistakes, sometimes they're really good — but either way, you have to double check their work." -Alex Dunae, daily ChatGPT user
Some things to be wary of:
Internet scams will get more insidious. Warn your (grand)parents.
This will likely exacerbate income equality on a scale we haven't seen in our lifetimes. Once you eliminate "menial" jobs, what will those workers do to earn a living?
Which brought up the point that capitalism should be on its last legs — if we had things like Universal Basic Income, we'd probably welcome AI assistants.
Cool factoids to impress your friends
GPT4All is a (free!) local AI chat application that runs on a computer's CPU — which means it's yours, all yours!! It's slower than ChatGPT, but it is (potentially) smarter — Oliver tells us that you can teach it, over time, to write in your voice.
The computational cost for ChatGPT is astronomical — it costs one million dollars a day to run!
Questions for the next roundtable:
Ethics behind using it for client work. Do you need to disclose? Will we see it showing up in contracts?
ChatGPT for journalism - what are media companies saying?
AI-powered customer service voice assistants (this is a business idea that is up for grabs btw. Oliver predicts it's a matter of weeks until it's a thing ;))
ChatGPTChat #2 is set for Wednesday, May 24 at 1pm. See you there!
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