Hurray! ChatGPT is Flawed

It’s all the buzz. News segments and articles. YouTube videos. Search results.

There are, it seems, three categories.

  1. Tutorials for how to use ChatGPT to be more productive

  2. Cautionary tales for how wrong ChatGPT can be

  3. Doomsday predictions

Essentially everyone is grappling with how to exist in a world where ubiquitous, in-your-face AI now exists. And each of the three responses are built on a foundation of fear, no matter how embracing they may seem.

Fear works a lot like grief. There are stages. Other than the fact that AI has been in our lives longer than the past three months, it seems we’ve largely skipped over denial. At least in terms of AI’s existence. And I’m not seeing the sort of anger that springs from fear.

What we are seeing is bargaining. That’s the coping mechanism behind each of the three categories of responses.

Tutorials are people saying I’m fine with this. If I embrace you, make friends with you, hang out with you, you won’t do many any harm, right?

Uncovering shortcomings is a bargain with ourselves. A self-deception designed to trick us into believing AI will have zero impact on our lives. If you’re wrong and I can tell you’re wrong, you can’t replace me.

Doomsday predictions are a bargain with the masses. Do you see me calling you out? You best behave.

We know that stages of grief are not linear. And this AI grief process is moving as fast as public AI experimentation.

In my lifetime I don’t believe I’ve seen an emergent technology response so clearly or transparently model a classic grief response amongst such a diverse swath of society. When my 83 year-old mother-in-law is talking about it after only a few months, WOW!

Where am I? Good question. I have no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Telegram, WhatsApp, blah, blah, blah, accounts. But, I do have LinkedIn, YouTube, Amazon, blah, blah, blah accounts. I’m impure. I also have a ChatGPT account. And I’ve found using it useful.

I’m also aware of dangers. Not the silly bargaining dangers. The real ones. The Neal Stephenson’s Fall Moab nuclear strike hoax level danger. But we’ve been living with that particular AI danger for a long time. The 2016 election was stolen from Hillary Clinton by AI-assisted bad actors.

Which brings me to bad actors. Just as porn drove innovation in the early internet, and ever more powerful guns improve our killing efficiency, it seems human to equip ourselves with ever better and more powerful tools to arm bad actors first. Then maybe we’ll get around to finding the good.

Have we advanced any technology to our betterment?

I’ve made it to acceptance.

The arc of humanity is long, and it bends towards extinction.

Darla Baker

Darla Baker is the author of the Amazon best-selling novel Eagle Cove (Thalia Chase: Sex Therapist Series, Book One). She is the founder of Stone Soup Community, a non-profit press focusing on helping queer writers market their books.

Darla lives with her wife on the shores of beautiful Lake Cumberland, Kentucky during lake season and on the road in her custom campervan, Dulcinea, the rest of the year. Her adorable staffy, Mati, is always by her side.

https://stonesoupcommunity.com
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