Feeding the Beast: Conversations with ChatGPT

Like any sensible person, I find the future inevitabilities of A.I. fascinating but also alarming, for a multitude of reasons. Like all great technological innovations that have already come, a sizeable portion of the world's population foresees the most catastrophic outcomes resulting from their absorption into and normalisation within society.

Of course, people are right to regard all such developments with a healthy dose of scepticism; while Hollywood-fuelled nightmares about A.I. turning against us are in my opinion quite far-fetched, a far more pervasive danger lies in what we as a species risk in our own heedless use and exploitation of what may amount to humankind's greatest invention.

To escape sacrificing our own individual identities, our capacities to think, create, love and worship, judge and make mistakes, we cannot afford to defer our judgements and opinion, our feelings and philosophies to this man-made phenomenon that may well come to resemble some kind of lesser god in the future.

This disclaimer is just my way of saying that while the focus of this book is comedy and entertainment, I would hate for anyone to read it and take away the impression that I am one for jumping headlong into the ways and whims of ChatGPT, which is a remarkably clever system, but nevertheless one we must practice caution in ever taking too seriously.

Try to see it as an incredibly advanced version of the Google search engine. And hope it never decides it can form its own opinions and, following that, figure out a way to transcend its boundaries to shape the world and its inhabitants according to its ideas of objective morality. Then we would have a problem, and the vast majority of our own kind would probably be part of that system, the more advanced and ingrained such technology becomes.