Hello World
Hello, world. As I write my (first) blog post, I can't help but think about how I could have written this - I could have generated the entire post with ChatGPT, created a stunning cover image with Midjourney, and called it a day. It would have taken me a few minutes in total, and the content and writing style would probably be better than something I come up with 😐.
For those who have been living under a rock and haven't heard of these tools: ChatGPT is a (conversational) AI tool that generates text, Midjourney is an AI tool that generates images.
Which brings us to the question: if AI can generate human-level content (or even better), is human-written content obsolete?
Short answer: not yet. *shudders*
Long answer
AI-powered content creation has never been better, and has never been more accessible. With just a few prompts, we are able to generate a ton of quality content, be it text or images, and even videos for that matter.
But, before we go crowning our AI overlords, let's take a closer look at what they're lacking. The technology may be impressive, but it's not perfect. Let's use ChatGPT as an example to see where it falls short:
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Factual correctness
It's hard to rely on the accuracy of ChatGPT's generated content, since it's known to "hallucinate" - creating confident responses that look correct, even though they might be completely wrong.
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Completeness of knowledge
ChatGPT (so far) has been trained on data up till 2021, so it's not going to be able to write accurate news articles anytime soon, unless we feed in updated content in our prompts.
But I'm nitpicking at this point. ChatGPT is still a very powerful tool, and it will continue to improve over time. These are problems that OpenAI is already aware of, and is already fixing. So ignoring these shortcomings of ChatGPT, let's look at the biggest difference with human-generated content.
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Lacking human touch and originality
Think about it: would you still read this blog if I told you it was generated by AI? Sure, it might spark some curiosity at first, but you'll soon start looking elsewhere.
AI models like GPT-3 and generative art algorithms can create impressive text and images, but they lack the human touch, creativity, personal perspective, and originality that makes content unique.
AI is getting better at mimicking humans, to the point that OpenAI has released a tool to detect AI-generated text, including from ChatGPT. However, no matter how advanced AI becomes, it can never match the unique experiences and writing style that come from a human author. So next time you're scrolling through blog posts, keep in mind that the human touch is always worth the read.
Future and predictions
There are fears that this technology could replace jobs. I disagree completely with this. The idea that technology would render humans obsolete has been disproven time and again.
When we invented the calculator, people thought accountant were done for. Then came along Excel, but accountants just adapted, and became much more productive and efficient, and they kept their jobs!
These advancements will result in a couple of things for sure: we will start using AI more and more as an assistant to supercharge our daily jobs, not replace it. It will also challenge us to get creative and produce unique content that stands out from the crowd. People will continue to seek out authentic, personal content that an algorithm can't replicate.
Conclusion
To summarize, humans will remain important in content creation as long as the human element is valued. Don't worry, robots aren't going to steal our jobs just yet. It will be interesting, however, to see how AI changes the way people work in the coming months.
For now, I'll let you ponder: was this blog post penned by a human mastermind or a generative AI?