𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐑𝐮𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐞𝐧: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐈 𝐨𝐧 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠

In just under a decade, humanity has made more progress with Artificial Intelligence than in the last 100 years. In just such a span of time, we have witnessed astonishing progress that surpasses anything seen in the last century. It is difficult to comprehend the sheer scale of these breakthroughs. Imagine an AI that can flawlessly emulate your behavior, mannerisms, and even your voice, creating a video of itself pretending to be you and saying things that you would say. Most people wouldn’t even question if it was genuinely you. Or perhaps an AI that writes essays and literature so convincingly that it could fool the vast majority of people into believing that a human created it. Yet, that’s exactly how far we’ve come in just the past 2-3 years.

In fact, what if I told you that the previous paragraph was written by an Artificial Intelligence? A paragraph that is so seemingly organic that even I wouldn’t question it if I read it. However, the truth is it was written by ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI. This AI model hasn’t even been out for half a year yet has already shaken the foundations of society. Although I assure you that the rest of this piece is genuinely written by me with zero input from the AI, the reality is that we can no longer ever be sure about what’s organic and what’s synthetic.

AI models like ChatGPT have presented themselves as the absolute bane to academic instructors who can no longer tell if their students’ written works were written by actual people or one of the latest Language AIs. But the effect of such inventions in the academic world is a different topic for another piece. This piece is about what Artificial Intelligence means for people like me. People who enjoy pouring their heart and soul into their written and spoken pieces, journalists who give their all to express themselves and inform the people, readers who love getting lost in novels and worlds of wonder found only in literature, or people who dream of one day publishing their own novel or book. But most of all, I want to discuss what this means for people whose entire livelihoods revolve around their skills as writers and language experts being relevant and useful. People like journalists, freelance writers, and linguists.

The reality is that we live in a world ruled by corporate greed and capitalist values that dominate the top. No matter what you think about big media giants like CNN, BBC, or even your local news and media network. At the end of the day, they are ruled at the top by people who keep these agencies funded and running. People who only care about how many ads they can safely saturate their articles with and how to make the most bang for their buck. For a minute, I want you to look at everything from the perspective of these corporate overlords.

If an AI model like ChatGPT and its numerous cousins, which are just as advanced, can write literally hundreds of articles in just a few minutes and also be able to calculate trends to produce the most clickbait and generate the most views, why would you not replace the hundreds of journalists for a much more efficient method of generating profits? These models can do everything a human journalist can while maximizing clickbait and minimizing costs. It’s the ultimate replacement for human resources.

And this isn’t just limited to journalists and big media. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or even Oda’s One Piece are beloved masterpieces because they have so much soul in them, and because it’s astounding that just a single human produced such masterpieces. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad is literally legendary because they’re so complex that most people don’t even believe Homer was a real human. Yet this coming era is going to be filled with authors who have access to machines like ChatGPT that can do all the thinking and world-building for them. And we won’t be able to know if we are reading a piece of work made by genuine human creativity and genius, or some clever commands prompted to a machine.

For the longest time, Big Tech’s justification for the AI revolution was that these inventions would take over menial jobs like construction, calculation, and retail, so that humans could focus on the more innovative and artistic jobs like writing and science. Yet, not even a decade into this revolution and the exact opposite is happening. In the mainstream it’s being used to emulate Ariana Grande and Jay-Z, literally steal styles of art from humans to emulate its own paintings and drawings, and write their own essays.

I’ve always been and still am a man of science, and I’ve always believed that innovating is for the best of humanity. But as it stands, humanity needs to re-evaluate its decisions. Tomorrow someone is going to completely cheat their way to a Ph.D. by asking ChatGPT to make their thesis paper and nobody is going to bat an eye, and perhaps a couple of years later IGN and Kotaku will be laying of hundreds of journalists. The way things are progressing now, I can only believe that the heart and soul of humanity are going to the gutter in the service of profits and efficiency.