Adriana Voljena *

@Latinoamérica21

ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence (AI) program, has caused an uproar not heard when similar technologies began to be applied with profit in areas such as machine translation. Clearly, ChatGPT threatens to produce more or less elaborate texts. This touched the sensitivities of journalists, with more scheduling options than the translators’ union fears.

The press enjoys replicating disastrous columns that confirm their fears, such as Yuval Harari’s in The New York Times (March 24, 2023). His sentence is apocalyptic. “Artificial intelligence could quickly devour all of human culture, everything we’ve produced over thousands of years, digest it, and start spewing forth a flood of new cultural artifacts. Not only school essays, but also political speeches, ideological manifestos and even holy books for new cults,” he said.

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For a long time, the relationship between the press and technology was very similar to that of politics. Accept the worst forecasts even before you have clear evidence.

In the same newspaper, but with less influence, Noam Chomsky together with two experts (2/8/2023) confirmed the exact opposite. From their good knowledge of generative language they stated: “The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a heavy statistical pattern-matching machine, gobbling up hundreds terabytes data and extrapolation of the most likely answer to a conversation or the most likely answer to a scientific question. In contrast, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates on small amounts of information.

Before and after

That creative possibility is what artificial intelligence cannot imitate. The fact that a certain sector of journalism feels threatened by this says more about the mechanics of the work it does than about the real possibilities that, as Harari predicts, artificial intelligence could “hack the foundations of our civilization.”

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Cut-and-paste journalism was already dead before the advent of ChatGP, as were monograph exams insisted on by nineteenth-century professors. Just as the policy that was based on repeating the same fashionable recipe for all campaigns has died out.

Again, Chomsky’s article says, the input of any human activity “does not seek to derive crude correlations between data points, but to create explanations.” The article adds an observation that seems to describe populist communication: “While humans are limited in the kinds of explanations we can rationally hypothesize, machine learning systems can learn both that the Earth is flat and that the Earth is round.” Just like an opportunistic political consultant who, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, might say, “These are my campaigns; If you don’t like them, I have others.”

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ChatGPT, the Promethean moment

Less resonant than Harari’s “blue pill” catastrophe of scarcity, Thomas L. Friedmann (3/21/2023) presents it as a Promethean moment. The journalist understands that the challenge of artificial intelligence is no different from the challenge of nuclear energy. This gave evidence of its destructive potential and, since it was in the sphere of governments, it was difficult to create “complex adaptive coalitions, where companies, government, social entrepreneurs, educators, competitive superpowers and moral philosophers meet” to define how we will get the best and mitigate the worst of artificial intelligence.”

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AI allows that path, which is the same as the pandemic one, where the virus did not differentiate between right and left, but orientation towards public services or ideological war.

Nor are we exempt from the new, and yet there are not so many threatening opinions as are awakened by each new technology that appears. Harari, along with 3,000 other prominent companies, including Elon Musk (Space X, Tesla and Twitter) and Steve Wozniak (Apple), is calling for a six-month halt to AI training. This pause should serve to make systems more robust and transparent, and for governments to speed up management policies. As a solution from experts on the subject from around the world, the letter is another warning. Disinformation has been in vogue for at least seven years and is still awaiting solutions from America. And most of the signatories have a direct relationship with the supposed recipients of the “open letter” to find ways more convenient than communicating their moral outrage to the world.

As the Prometheus myth says, the old gods are outraged because Titan gave fire to humans. This century saw the advent of cloning, a technology that did not multiply humans, but was necessary for the development of vaccines. Even Wikipedia was condemned as the end of culture and a threat to teachers, just like ChatGPT today. Chomsky remembers Sherlock Holmes telling Dr. Watson, “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.” To give you an idea of ​​the amazing things AI has to offer, ChatGPT has responded Political dialogue some questions about its possible use in politics, in different aspects. Going through some of their responses, it can be confirmed that ChatGPT is more judicious and judicious when giving opinions than some people. (OR)

*Adriana Amado is a doctor of social sciences. President of Infociudadan. Researcher at Worlds of Journalism Studyz. Journalist for the newspaper ‘La Nación’ and a radio station in the city of Buenos Aires.

*Text originally published in Political Dialogue