Mulhall column: Artificial Intelligence | PostIndependent.com
Mainly at the behest of my son, I recently downloaded ChatGPT to learn how it works and to see if it’s half as good as he claims.
“It will write anything you tell it to,” he tells me. As a writer, and a student of literature and speech, this was something I had to see. So, I downloaded it from the App Store.
ChatGPT’s interface is simple enough, similar to your phone’s messaging app. Instead of entering a text message, you type in what you want AI to write.
It even provides examples. One said, “Write an email to a plumber requesting backflow testing.”
So, I clicked the example, and sure enough, it barfed out an email to a yet-to-be-named plumber requesting backflow testing. It was gloriously simple, to the point, and unencumbered by misspellings, usage errors, or human punctuation issues.
“Ha,” I thought, “I know a way to test its mettle,” and I typed “Write an essay in the voice of Hunter S. Thompson.”
In a flash, AI blasted out 629 words not just in the voice of Hunter S. Thompson, but on the subject of plumbing backflow testing titled, “Fear and Loathing in the Plumbing Jungle.”
The essay’s opening line read, “The sun was blistering hot, a merciless orb hanging in the sky, taunting me with its oppressive glare as I sat in the shade of my porch, nursing a gin and tonic.”
Not awful. But not HST.
Thompson himself started his book with the line, “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
No doubt there’s plenty of alcohol consumption in Thompson’s book, but booze runs a distant second to drugs, as I recall. By the end of the first paragraph in Fear and Loathing, Duke and his lawyer are hallucinating huge bats due to some unknown drug, which, by comparison, makes contemplating the sun while sipping a gin and tonic on a shaded porch a bit tame.
It’s difficult to place plumbing maintenance on the same plane as a drug depraved road trip to cover a motorcycle race in the Las Vegas desert, and even harder, I think, to write credible prose that reads like HST might have written it, but to its credit ChatGPT did a better job than I thought it could.
(You do refer to AI as “it,” don’t you? Not because of some chat bot pronoun preference thing, but because sex, and therefore gender, belong in the realm of the biological, right?)
The essay’s second sentence introduces the subject of plumbing: “The phone rang, and I knew it was the call I had been dreading – the call that would plunge me into the murky underworld of local plumbers and backflow testing, a task as daunting and treacherous as any political campaign or drug-fueled escapade.”
Plumbers, backflow testing, politics and drugs in the same sentence? Sure enough. The plumbing angle stemmed from my initial choice for AI to write an email requesting plumbing service, and the politics and drugs from my request for an essay in the voice of HST.
When I began poking around the ChatGPT interface, I didn’t want or even envision such an essay. Who would? Yet, AI slammed the two requests together, maybe because it figured I didn’t know what I wanted and the mash-up might amuse me, which it did.
But how did it know that?
Some say AI will become self-aware one of these days soon, and we all know what happens then — I mean, who hasn’t seen “The Terminator?”
As cool as AI may be in its present form, it may be a while before AI’s self-awareness has us hiding from robots in bunkers and burning undetectable fires in shelled out TVs.
As a writer of at least some repute, it looks like the practical uses of AI are for me limited right now. What I don’t need is for AI to write.
What would be truly helpful, and appreciated, is if AI would mow the yard while I write a column.
Mitch Mulhall is a husband, father, and longtime Roaring Fork Valley resident. His column appears monthly in the Post Independent and at PostIndependent.com.
