The One Where ChatGPT Saves the World!
Is semantic knowledge about to become worthless?
I love following the story surrounding ChatGPT and reading the excellent articles on it by Gary Marcus and others.
A big theme of the past couple of weeks has been the concept of “Chatbot Apocalypse” - a maybe soon-to-be world where the internet has become so flooded by automated content that it is no longer possible to determine what is accurate information about any topic… and what is not.
Most commentators assume that this would be bad.
I’m not so sure.
How might it be to live in a world where all semantic information about a new or breaking topic had to be assumed to be suspect? Where you literally couldn’t rely on any form of news as being accurate? Where your search engine was so deluged with contradictory opinions that you had no way to determine what was actually the truth of anything?
I think that what would happen is that we would start to reject semantic knowledge and begin to use our intuition and our feeling sense more. Our world would start to “re-localise” as the only information that could be relied upon would be that which we could perceive directly with our own senses. Or that which trusted others told us face-to-face without any tech in between.
Actually, this might not be such a terrible thing.
I think NFTs might fix these issues. NFTs publicly prove provenance. You can ask an AI to generate something only using human-generated materials - or whatever your needs may be.
I like your exploration.
I have been musing recently on the ubiquitous part that 'story' plays in our lives, particularly how hard it is to avoid basing beliefs, decisions and actions on information for which we can never vouch fully the accuracy.
A documentary on the history of Russia (post Kievan Rus) really brought this home to me, though I was already hyper aware of it (especially given the events of the last 3+ years).
It lead me to ponder where I put undue weight on what I read and hear (even though I think I am evaluating the information as objectively as I can) and what my life my be like if I was more circumspect about everything I am told. I think I am already part way there, but what you write about felt sense and intuition add an interesting twist.
I can see some significant benefits and some potential downsides, but even if it were a utopian solution, the path there could, I believe, be very choppy.