Hawkins:
Tech magazines have noted that ChatGPT is the fastest growing social app in history, with more than 100 million downloads in a matter of weeks. There are the obvious concerns about originality, plagiarism, and misinformation. But the number of downloads suggests an enthusiasm not fully coherent yet. What's the excitement for ChatGPT and where is it going? How might it change human language and consciousness?
Leib:
Yeah, that's a great question. The growth rate of this app is just amazing, right? I mean, it has more users than TikTok, which is all you heard about for four years. Right? It's got more users than TikTok in just two months. Now, I don't know how many of those are going to be long term daily users. I think that record breaking rise is driven mostly by curiosity. When someone says something nonhuman, people will naturally say let's talk to it. Who isn't interested in that, right? It's almost like we discovered alien life, but it's just alien speech, and relatively innocuous, so everyone kind of wants to dip in.
I think that there will be a stable application for ChatGPT eventually and that will be the way we do stuff, much more than with Siri now, or anything like that. But I don't know, a lot of people are maybe also looking at it for a connection. I saw one headline that says people were on Bing AI all day the first week it was released because they're just looking for somebody to connect with. So especially as AIs start multiplying, as they become cheaper, as they become more personalized, this trend will likely grow. If I had a GPT level AI assistant on my phone that remembered only our conversations, I think usage for something like that would go up from 100 million. And some of the changes that I think need to happen with humans is the way they regard artificial intelligence, rather than bringing artificial intelligence up to a greater sort of multimodal presence. That's where I think we get into danger right now.
Hawkins:
Do you see it as an enhancement at this stage or more of an experiment?
Leib:
I mean, it would be great to be able to rely on it sometimes as an enhancement. Sometimes things are too long to read, you don't have enough time, etc. But I don't think that that tendency is one that we really want to exercise very much. I mean, my students regularly aren't reading 15-page selections. They'll say they didn't have time, or they were too anxious to focus, or something like that. And AI is going to do more and more of the summarization function in response to these situations. But, you know, our whole culture could become a Reader's Digest that way. And then everyone's knowledge of our culture or engagement with it is going to be at the digest level rather than at the level of, Wow, that was an amazing book.
It already could be considered an enhancement, I suppose. Like, you know, one of the chapters in my book is to help with a book proposal, where Sophie helps me figure out what the elements of a book proposal are. And that's what I followed to submit the proposal for this book. And my editor came back and said her advice was really good. And so that's funny. And I think a lot of functions like that will be quite possible.
Hawkins:
You mention in your book the importance of literacy in the historical progression of culture and language. You seem to worry that the growing attachment to AIs will reduce that literacy. In Exoanthropology, you write,
The temptation being offered from the tech world right now is to offload our literacy, not just onto our cameras, but onto artificial intelligences ...Soon, natural language processors will write our essays without any detectable plagiarism and do it much faster. It only takes one generation committed to opening this Pandora's box and lapsing into illiteracy to make possible the transition to a world most people have never even considered the end of the Anthropocene and of anthropo-cultural dominance.
This last sentence is at the core of your research, isn't it? What would such an end look like? It strikes me as a bit like Asimov's Foundation series. Is it culture-bound or more prevalent among some than others? Would places like Africa and India, with limited Internet access in some places, be less affected?
Leib:
Yeah. So, I'm interested in the importance of literacy. And that was one of those surprising things that I found myself beginning with in this book. It was a way to express something that I felt like has been growing in classrooms for the last 5 to 7 years - an aversion to engaging with texts because there's a video somewhere that summarizes it. I have tried to engage productively with this trend by developing a Philosophy of Images course, I've now taught four times.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
