Will ChatGPT Forever Transform Business? And Life?

Revolutions are messy. Change brings disruption. And disorder creates anxiety and fear. In the end, there are winners and there are losers. The trick? Ensuring you’re on the winning side. Now for some background. In the past 300 years, Western Civilization has experienced four distinct “Industrial Revolutions.” Each delivered enormous benefits. And each caused great suffering to those who progress suddenly made “obsolete.” 

Case in point: late 18th century British textile manufacturers harnessed steam to power looms and spinning jennies, putting thousands of factory workers out on the street at the same time they provided consumers with better made, lower-cost clothing. A hundred years later, electricity and the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine ushered in mass production—and the consumer economy—simultaneously displacing thousands of skilled artisans who had made their living crafting products by hand. 

Then, starting in the mid-1950s, “automation”—first computerized number-crunching and then automated assembly lines—greatly reduced the demand for manual labor at the same time it vastly boosted industrial productivity and profits. We are now in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by the adoption of advanced robots and artificial intelligence. Since the first of the year, the media has been abuzz with stories about user-friendly AI systems that can create original art on-demand or write a blog post indistinguishable from one written by a human being. 

As before, companies and consumers stand to benefit enormously from these technological breakthroughs. And, once again, we’re hearing cries of protest from creatives who see their livelihoods going the way of the buggy whip makers and telephone switchboard operators.

But just how advanced is this AI, and what threat does it pose to today’s workers? Perhaps the hottest company in the machine learning business right now is OpenAI, a San Francisco-based non-profit research and development organization focused on developing powerful, user-friendly applications for the home and consumer market. 

Its generative AI, ChatGPT (GPT = Generative Pre-trained Transformer), uses simple user prompts to create anything from short, descriptive paragraphs to page-long blog posts to application codes that can be cut-and-pasted directly into websites. Its DALL-E 2 image generator works in a similar fashion, but takes user descriptions and transforms them into original, professional-level images.

Although OpenAI has been getting a lot of press recently—it acquired a million users in a record five days!—the company is just one of many that have recently made AI-driven text and graphic art applications available to the public, either for free or on a paid subscription basis.

Now for the implications. Should authors, copywriters, and graphic artists be looking for a new line of work? And if creatives aren’t safe from AI encroachment, who is? First, let’s look at exactly what an app like ChatGPT can actually do. I tried it out myself. When I asked it to: “write one paragraph on how artificial intelligence is threatening the careers of creative writers,” the application produced the following:

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to generate written content, and this has the potential to threaten the careers of creative writers. With the ability to produce written content in a fraction of the time it would take a human, AI-powered tools are being used to create everything from news articles to social media posts. As a result, the demand for human writers may decrease, leading to fewer job opportunities and potential financial struggles for those in the field. Additionally, the use of AI-generated content may lead to a decline in the quality and originality of written work, further diminishing the value of human writers.

At first glance, such output is impressive. The language is coherent. Spelling and punctuation are correct. And the app created the paragraph in all of five seconds. At the same time, the writing clearly lacks personality. There’s no sense of rhythm. No style. And, as many critics have pointed out, pure AI-generated text often contains misinformation, dubious insights, and questionable logic threads. 

To this point, the concluding sentence above declares, “The use of AI-generated content may lead to a decline in the quality and originality of written work, further diminishing the value of human writers.” If AI is indeed threatening to usher in a decline in prose quality and originality, that should necessarily increase, not diminish, the value of human writers, since providing these exceptional attributes is the one thing such algorithms can’t (yet) deliver.

AI-driven image generators are similarly sketchy. The request, “Create a Norman Rockwell-style picture of a robot sitting in an office cubicle typing on a computer keyboard” produced several cartoonish images, including this one:

A Saturday Evening Post cover, it’s not.

There’s no doubt ChatGPT, Dall-E 2, and its ilk will reduce the need for dry, boilerplate-style writing and some basic commercial illustrations. Yet not every person is onboard with this brave new of doing things. In fact, 22-year-old Princeton student Edward Tian was recently featured in NPR about how he’s feverishly developing applications to help teachers and others detect when essays and articles have been written by AI. “I think we're absolutely at an inflection point," Tian said in the article. "This technology is incredible. I do believe it's the future. But, at the same time, it's like we're opening Pandora's Box. And we need safeguards to adopt it responsibly."

Ironically, Tian is using ChatGPT to “out” itself. Even so, his approach shows people are very much a part of this story and will continue to be, even as we witness incredible technological advances. Importantly, just like the IT revolution of the 1990s and 2000s created new and exciting jobs like website designer, social media manager, and cloud computing engineer, we may expect AI to create whole new career categories that are only now being imagined. 

Ultimately, AI is likely to create far more jobs than it displaces. Because, in the end, humans can do two things even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems cannot: think and dream. To learn more about how your company can better integrate AI and other disruptive technologies into your company culture, please contact me today at laura@conoverconsulting.com.