unswsydney

If you’re not a very good writer, fucked is probably the correct adjective.

But if you’re any good, ChatGPT is not going to be much of a threat. Indeed you can use it to help brainstorm and even do the dull bits. Toby

We’re still working out what ChatGPT can and can’t do.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have already surprised us. We didn’t expect them to write code. But they can. After all there is a lot of code out on the internet that ChatGPT and other LLMs have been trained on.

Hopefully AI will do the 4Ds – the dirty, dull, difficult and the dangerous. But equally they might change warfare, disrupt politics, not in a good way and cause other harms to our society. It’s up to us to work out where and where to let AI into our lives and where not to let AI in.

Toby

Ha! Good question. But it will stake a better question than that to catch me out. How do I know you’re a real person asking me a question?

Toby

100%. You have a good idea of what ChatGPT does. It doesn’t understand what it is saying. It doesn’t reason about what it says. It just says things that are similar to what others have already said. In many cases, that’s good enough. Most business letters are very similar, written to a formula. But it’s not going to come up with some novel legal argument. Or some new mathematics. It's repeating and synthesizing the content of the web.

Toby

The only way to be sure someone is not cheating with ChatGPT is to put them in exam conditions. In a room without access to any technology.

Tools for “detecting” computer generated content are easily defeated. Reorder and reword a few sentences. Ask a different LLM to rephrase the content. Or to write it in the style of a 12 year old.

And yes, I do see this moment very much like the debate we had when I was a child about the use of calculators. And the calculator won that debate. We still learn the basics without calculators. But when you’ve mastered arithmetic, you then get to use a calculator whenever you want, in exams or in life. The same will be true I expect for these writing tools.

Toby