FW Feb blog: ChatGPT - What happens when we outsource the power to think?

If you’d like to listen to the blog, you can do so?here.

I doubt it’ll come as much of a surprise that I’m not a fan of the latest AI tech, ChatGPT, that’s filling the headlines. Or, indeed, that I’m writing this month's blog about it – after all, #WTFW?! likes to cover things that might interest you, our lovely readers. (And just to note – this is written by me and not the chatbot – I thought I’d test it out by asking it to write a blog in the style of FW and see what came forth. But it seems everyone else is having a go, and the ‘computer-says-no' message was ‘ChatGPT is at capacity right now’.)

But why do I feel so viscerally revolted by the idea of it? And I use those words quite deliberately – I’ve actually been feeling quite nauseous when thinking of this technology. It’s not because, as a writer, I think it’s going to render me redundant just yet. After all, the chatbot works by ‘scraping’ the internet for publicly available information, and the source material we use to write corporate reports is a) not in the public domain and thus not available for scraping, and b) not held internally within a company in a place or form that even an internal chatbot could gather and write from. Not to mention that the key to everything we write is what we hear during our interviews with the Board and senior execs.

And so the ability of chatbots to write corporate reports is, in my view, going to come down to companies’ ability to bring all of their internal information together in an easily ‘scrapable’ system, and management’s interest in sharing their views indiscriminately with that system. At least for the foreseeable, then, I’m not worried about losing all our business to this new machine.

So why the sense of doom? Is it because of the enormous potential this technology has, in the wrong hands, for misinformation? That’s definitely got something to do with it. After all, we’ve seen the terrible consequences of unscrupulous leaders feeding fake information, often through social media, that gets taken up and believed to the detriment of all of us by an uninformed public. But at least they’ve had to do some work in writing their tweets, or giving their speeches, in the first place. Now all anyone has to do is put lies into ChatGPT and ask it to write a thoughtful, coherent article in the style of the FT or some other respected news organisation, and bingo, we have beautifully written, sensibly argued rubbish masquerading as fact. And perhaps the really unscrupulous will try to pass off their lies as the work of a trustworthy commentator or news outlet. Who knows. And yes, as someone whose work is dedicated to enhancing the sum total of truthful information in the public domain, this worries me. A lot.

But still – all of that is cerebral; somehow it’s not visceral. So I spent this week, when not busily at work on reporting (without the aid of a chatbot), pondering on my deep sense of unease. And it finally came to me this morning, as such answers often do, while I was snoozing away in my pew, waiting for the choir to have its moment. (As regular readers will know, I often write my monthly blog on a Sunday afternoon, when I can be sure neither phone nor email will intervene.)

This Sunday in the Christian calendar is called Candlemas, and I love it because we get to sing the Nunc Dimittis, one of my favourite liturgical anthems; particularly when, as today, the setting of it is Stanford in C major*. So what is Candlemas, and what has the Nunc Dimittis got to do with chatbots?

For those not familiar with it, Candlemas commemorates the presentation of Jesus in the temple, in line with Jewish practice of the time, when the firstborn son was presented, and the mother purified after childbirth. What’s special, and what I love about the story, is the presence in the temple of Simeon, a very old man on his deathbed. He utters the prayer known as the Nunc Dimittis (set out at the end of the blog, if you’re interested) which is sung every Candlemas. In this prayer, as well as asking God to release him from life, Simeon prophesies the redemption of the world by Jesus, and in those words encapsulates the idea that everyone is equal – and equally blessed – in the sight of God.

Of course, you don’t need to be a Christian, or indeed a member of any other religion, or even to believe in God at all, to believe in the essence of that principle; which is that every individual should have the same rights (and responsibilities) as everyone else. That we should all be treated equally, and offered the same opportunities, regardless of the circumstances of our birth. And despite that ideal, which is professed by so many, one of the greatest problems we have in the world today is the massive – and widening – inequality between rich and poor.

And I realised that it was this issue, the issue of widening inequality, that was at the heart of what I find so disturbing about ChatGPT. Why? Because, putting aside external support or lack thereof, the one inherent ability people have to overcome inequality by themselves is the power of their brains. The ability to think, to reason, to understand the world, and thus to get on within it. And with ChatGPT, we are finally outsourcing our brains. We are outsourcing our ability to think.

The ability to think doesn’t just happen by itself. Studies abound that show the benefits of exercising the brain. While we are all born with the potential for thought, without training, without education, without real mental effort, our brains will waste away. And when machines take over so much of what brains can do, who’s going to bother with training and educating the poorer parts of society? Or the less well-connected? It’ll be too expensive, when, after all, you could outsource all that, far more cheaply, to a machine.

I don’t doubt for a moment that ChatGPT could eventually write a cleverer, wittier, more insightful, thoughtful blog than I could. Or that it could make writing code, literature or anything else that much quicker and easier. But to what end? I don’t want to read something – however brilliant – written by a machine. I want to know and understand, and celebrate, my fellow human beings. If we are to believe our political leaders, our corporate leaders – most human leaders in fact – they all want to make a better, fairer world for everyone. If what they say is true, then I urge them to develop the rules and regulations for this technology that will truly enable them to fulfil that purpose. And in the meantime, ban this technology from our schools and academic institutions, from the workplace, from any place that would otherwise encourage human endeavour and creativity.

We cannot close our eyes to this technology, or pretend it doesn’t exist. But, like the nuclear bomb, we don’t have to use it.

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Nunc Dimittis, or Canticle of Simeon

Earlier in his life, Simeon was visited by the Holy Spirit who told him that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. And so he lived on, until finally, on that day in the temple, he saw and recognised Jesus, and so uttered this prayer.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace

According to thy word.

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,

Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people

To be a light to lighten the Gentiles

And to be the glory of thy people Israel.

?* For a beautiful rendition of Charles Villiers Stanford’s Nunc Dimittis in C, sung by Durham Cathedral Choir, you can listen here – the Nunc Dimittis starts at 5:12 (although the Magnificat, or Canticle of Mary, that comes before is also worth a listen!).