Unafraid: The Rise of the AI Chatbots

My friends in the agency world certainly have their ears pricked up with the recent typhoon of news around the topic of ChatGPT, OpenAI, and sudden acceleration of the race to release previously secretive now urgent projects from Google and Microsoft.

The initial reactions range from the heart skipping a beat to a casual dismissal of the whole thing.  The heart-beat-skipper now proclaims "bring on the monsters!"  She's ready for battle. The casual-dismisser is now more afraid, triggered by Microsoft Bing's, or rather Sydney's, quick regression into a clawing, needy, English-is-my-second-language-sounding, love-seeking...well, who knows what the objective is there (see the recent February 16, 2023 NY Times article by Kevin Roose.)

I am not afraid. 

I think artificial intelligence has potential as a massively useful tool to accelerate research, assist in the development of effective content, and help the human mind to more efficiently find clarity amongst the never-ending clutter of thoughts, emotions, and intentions it must sort through on a second-by-second basis to make some sort of meaning in this world.

And I do think AI will be able to produce search-optimized, pagerank-winning content, or I suppose, replace the need for those search algorithms entirely. Let them. That's a race to the bottom.

What AI will never be able to do is eliminate the need for the human soul to express itself. AI may produce poetic words that land powerfully with the reader, but it cannot ever do for David Whyte what writing "Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another" did for David Whyte, or do for Jean-Dominique Bauby what writing "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" did for Jean-Dominique Bauby.

The purpose of developing a textual piece like a poem or a visual piece like a painting is not only for the reader. Sure, AI can accomplish that -- creating things we want to read or see -- and unfortunately do it at a much more rapid pace and large scale. So, we will see a lot of it. No doubt. I remain interested in reading any piece that connects with a part of me that needs nourishment, regardless of how it came to be. 

However, the uncanny valley is more than a useful metaphor for the eerie sense that there are limits to our emotional response to something that only resembles a human being. 

Reading Whyte or Bauby has no sense of being "uncanny." I may be fooled by an AI system that is able to develop an unending, Seinfeld-esque animated episode (search: twitch seinfeld), but Jerry Seinfeld would never be. There's a huge difference there in the true nature of that content -- simply by the fact of who, or what, created it.

No doubt there will be bad actors using AI as a means to pursue nefarious ends. But what can and never will be replaced, by any current or future technology, is the artist's quest to express to the world that idea deep in their being that needs to find its way into the outer world.