I report on AI for Reuters in Silicon Valley, ask me anything!

Are you just feeding all the questions directly to ChatGPT so you don't have to bother with writing answers?

That would be smart!

Definitely not! It’s fun for me to think and write, even if that can take more time than for ChatGPT to generate text.

JD

What is one area/industry that you see AI having a large effect on that people have no idea is coming/possible?

There is a lot of discussion about romance with AI, including an excellent recent article by my colleague Anna Tong: https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-happens-when-your-ai-chatbot-stops-loving-you-back-2023-03-18/

One less-explored area where AI could have a major impact is eldercare. Huge swaths of the world have aging populations and low birth rates relative to prior decades. How might we handle minor chores as well as find meaning when we’re in our 80s, 90s or older, absent families to support us? AI potentially can step in there. Various companies are working on robotics to help around the home, and if you combine that with the human-like speech of say ChatGPT, you could imagine a big business around AI companions living with and supporting the elderly.

JD

Can you paint a picture of how you believe AI will be used for the average person in day to day life in 5 years time? Thank you.

It’s hard to generalize across jobs, regions and many other factors. There’s a decent chance that AI will have developed in unexpected ways, though most likely we’ll see the advances announced today simply being available to far more people. For instance, that means the white-collar employee can arrive at their office and have an AI assistant summarize messages from the evening before. An AI assistant can take live notes during a virtual video-conference meeting. And the assistant can draft documents that the individual glances over and edits before submitting to a manager. Interestingly, the latest technology suggests AI might encourage daydreaming, helping an office worker plan and book their holiday in rapid time.

JD

What do you think is the impact of AI technology on your specific industry (journalism)? Are you in any way afraid about what may lay ahead regarding your job?

The news business has faced a lot of challenges in recent years, but journalism is still thriving. I expect the same will be the case even as AI makes writing faster or drafts whole articles outright. A key to journalism is talking to people and building trust, which lets a reporter find stories that aren’t obvious or have been kept secret. That makes me hopeful readers will keep subscribing and affording journalists the ability to inform the public.

JD

Hi! What sort of regulations should government entities be considering right now and how could that impact the use of AI technology going forward?

These are huge questions facing society, with no sole answer. There tends to be high-level agreement among businesses and regulators that any law should mitigate harm from AI without hampering innovation. AI should not perpetuate real-world discrimination in housing and employment, for instance. But regulation gets complicated quickly. If an AI company trained its technology on text from Harry Potter, and that technology then reproduces Harry Potter-like text on a user’s command, is that plagiarism? Is that a copyright violation? It will be exciting to report on how governments approach such questions in the coming years.

JD

What sectors or industries do you expect will need more human workers as AI creates more work for them?

One potentially growing category of work is “prompt engineering,” where the focus is on how to get AI to accomplish the task you want.

JD

What is the scariest/most worrying aspect of AI dominated world?

Some would say the answer is doomsday: various people developing precisely this technology think AI could lead to human extinction. That’s why there is a lot of emphasis on “alignment,” the idea that companies should build AI so it matches human values and follows human intent.

JD

Thank you for the great questions. If you’d like to follow my reporting on AI or get in touch, I can be reached at https://twitter.com/JLDastin.

JD

What are your thoughts that instead of massive job loss, AI may instead cause a programming golden age with individual contributors becoming much more productive and new software, especially indie games being churned out at a breakneck pace?

What you’re describing is a hope that many people and companies in AI have. Products like Github’s Copilot are already helping software engineers produce or debug code faster, with gaming representing one potential application. The technology is still in its early stages though, so we’ll have to see a) just how productive it makes developers, and b) what if any consequences for jobs there will be.

JD

I’m concerned that bad actors on the extreme right and extreme left will figure out how to manipulate AI - chatbots in particular - for political gain, making it easier to push biased, unverified information into the hands of a general electorate that favors convenience and ease of access over critical thinking and asking questions.

Why am I wrong, and why should I be hopeful that humanity won’t absolutely screw this up? Why should I not be concerned about how this technology will be manipulated, thus pushing us one step closer to the brink of civil war?

The tech and cybersecurity sources I’ve talked to are very concerned as well about disinformation spread faster and more widely by AI chatbots. Their concern is a silver lining, to the extent that industry is discussing how to mitigate harm and civil society is thinking more about this. One resource that individuals and organizations can use to determine if AI drafted some dubious content is here: https://gptzero.me/.

JD

When Google and Microsoft's ChatGPTs are done, will they be available to the public without an account? Alternatively, will they be available through existing accounts people have with their companies?

My understanding is that existing accounts will gain access eventually. Google this week began opening up Bard, its ChatGPT rival, to people in the U.S. and UK; you can join a waitlist here: https://bard.google.com/ And you can sign up to try the chatbot in Microsoft’s Bing search engine, powered by OpenAI, here: https://www.bing.com/new?form=MY028Z&OCID=MY028Z

JD

Do you have any insight on the legal side of AI? If so, do you think AI will eventually push human lawyers out of the courtroom?

There appear to be various ways AI can impact the legal profession, including helping with document discovery, drafting contracts and so on. You can read about one early deployment here: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/openai-backed-startup-brings-chatbot-technology-first-major-law-firm-2023-02-15/

That said, the sources I’ve talked to said it’s highly unlikely that AI would replace the work of human lawyers, which depends on negotiation, reasoning and other high-touch work.

JD

You mention "Google and Microsoft" and I think there are lots of other companies well positioned to take advantage of this technology.

Adobe Firefly seems interesting, and OpenAI is obviously emerging as an important company.

Any thoughts on which companies will evolve to be important in this space?

You are right; there are many companies including the ones you mentioned with ambitions here. Some startups that have gained a lot of attention are Inflection AI, Cohere and Adept; you can see an interesting demonstration of Adept’s early software here: https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952

Some venture capitalists think the technology sector is ripe for disruption by these or other companies. The reason to call out Google and Microsoft (along with its partner OpenAI) is because they have focused on developing so-called “large language models” for years and have moved fast to deploy them.

JD