If we had an ounce of collective will, says Jemima Lewis in The Daily Telegraph, we would strangle ChatGPT (the new AI that can write like a human) at birth. We already know this technology will end in tears. Why do we masochistically unleash upon ourselves another “tool for digital mischief and misery”? The singer Nick Cave warned this week of the “emerging horror” of the new tech, which is merely a “grotesque mockery” of human creativity.
It’s undoubtedly rubbish when it tries to mimic “any kind of genius”. The bigger worry is how easily it will replace copywriters by churning out bland, textureless words for council websites, banks, corporations and NHS leaflets. And what happens when it gets things wrong? After all, in its own words, “it can generate text that is biased due to the data it’s trained on”. Are we really so stupid as to hand over the “human voice” to a “digital ventriloquist” who has been trained on the “conspiracy theories, bigotry and sloppy thinking” of the internet? “If so, perhaps the robots deserve to win.”