A.I. Yai, Yai

I dipped a toe into A.I.

A few posts ago we asked some youths what they were planning to wear for back-to-school. Loy (17) tipped us off to jeans from Zara and a white T-shirt from Aritzia. I also asked her about tech? Were there any new must-have gadgets she had to get her hands on for fall? Any software that we should be aware of? That question lead us into a conversation about A.I. She said that some kids (not her) are using A.I. to write their papers. BRAIN EXPLODE. Her dad quickly jumped in and said “But I’m sure the teachers are able to catch that type of plagiarism. They can just copy the text and run it through…” He trailed off. Run it through what? Google? But there’s no preexisting piece of writing that it can be matched to - right?

Loy shrugged and said that A.I. writing can be totally unique based on the information you are plugging into the app. Her dad and I were stunned into dead silence.

I marched myself over to google and typed in “A.I. student papers” and landed on this Atlantic Article:

The College Essay Is Dead

Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia. By Stephen Marche

In the article there is an example of a well written essay created entirely from GPT-3.

GPT-3 is is a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it.

Is this Substack post being written by GPT-3? Oh god! Is it? AM I GPT-3! This existential crisis moved me to type GPT-3 into the App Store and a shit-ton of A.I. type apps popped up.

I got spooked. Does even just looking at A.I. make me a scab? SAG is striking for better pay, stronger contributions to pensions, residuals from streaming services and legal control over how A.I. is allowed to be used. A.I. can potentially replace writers, actors, background artists, visual effects, post production and more. It can create without the presence of creators.

After checking in with my union rep I dowloaded this app:

Why this app? Well, it was one of the first options and it had a lot of reviews. Not sure how GPT-4 differs from GPT-3 and not willing to figure it out at this time. I swiped left on the continue button and ended up at this slide:

That lady sent a chill up my spine. Goddamnit the future is here. I continued with a free three day trial. After three days the weekly $6.99 kicks in. Gotta say the yearly price of $39.99 certainly beats the weekly at $335.52/ year. Maybe GPT-4 can’t do math.