It’s likely I’m going to spend the next few days thinking out loud about the recent AI announcements from OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook. I barely slept last night, as only yesterday did the ramifications of this week really begin to set in.
Bluntly, I think my job as a copy editor is largely gone, or could be within twelve months. This realization only hit me tonight as I was talking to my parents — why it hadn’t occurred to me months ago as I tooled around with ChatGPT 3.5, I don’t know. But thinking back, the very first thing I asked ChatGPT was to write a New York Times article about the destruction of the moon. And it did. It wrote it better than many of my editing clients.
I think I am obsolete.
I read that the new ChatGPT 4 can ingest images, too. Meaning you can sketch a website on a piece of paper. Snap a photo of it, then upload. Tell it to write a website that looks like your sketch…and it does. In seconds. Goodbye, web designers.
I read it now gets into the 90th percentile when taking the bar exam. Goodbye, lawyers.
The way I think about the internet has completely shifted in the last 24 hours. No longer is it a tool for communication between humans, but rather the amniotic fluid of these Large Language Models. And their fuel. They ingest everything on the internet — and ‘learn’ from it. That LiveJournal I kept in high school was food for these things. The purpose of the internet is now something else.
What happens when millions of people like me lose their jobs? What happened when millions of Americans had their jobs shipped overseas in the wake of NAFTA? I grew up in rural America — I spend a lot of time in towns long since hollowed out as industry moved to cheaper markets. Sure, we saved a buck, but the cost was the livelihoods of thousands of people, of their purpose. Humans are many things, and as cliche and unoriginal and obvious as it is, a good job is enough for most people to feel fulfilled in their sense of purpose, providing shelter and food to their families. What happened when those jobs left? Over the last 30 years, hopelessness and drugs moved in, suicides started increasing, small towns withered, and populism flourished.
The technological progress of the next 5 years is going to make the progress of the last thirty seem glacial.
I’m already exhausted by the potential instability.
What happens when children are raised with these LLMs? We thought Google was bad… Who will need to learn anything if we could just ask the LLM? Who will need to learn to code? Who will need to learn to write?