ChatGPT and a history degree
I want to start this off by really emphasising the fact that I have never had an interest in technology or anything of that means. Whilst I would occasionally have the debate about the use of self checkout machines at Tesco, and their impact as human cashiers slowly became obsolete, in my day to day life I didn’t give it much thought. The irony is just now sinking in that I am spending the first half of my summer writing for a tech company…
At Christmas, however, I was introduced to ‘ChatGPT’, and once again I didn’t think much of it at the time. Yet a 45 minute conversation with my history tutor at university, over the world of ‘Artificial Intelligence’, changed that. The majority of my classmates used the word ‘terrifying’ to describe their feelings towards it, with many of them worried that there would be no space left for them in the job market with their history degrees, as a ‘Chat GPT’ robot could supposedly do any job better than we could. These jobs ranging from academia to journalism. Just look at the recent WGA Writers Strike. My tutor responded rather abruptly to these fears by declaring that ‘Chat GPT’ was not terrifying. “Putin bombing Ukraine is terrifying” he retorted.
Yet my fears over AI did not stem from a potential job loss, but rather how ChatGPT will distort our historical interpretation of the world. The emotion of history and news reporting will be replaced with a well-balanced, neat argument, built on thousands of internet sources, perfectly summarised by a robot. When people refer to AI, the first argument I often hear is that it cannot replace science or discovery. A robot cannot cure cancer. Yet as a student who has always specialised in arts, I see the argument that a robot cannot create true human emotion in its writing, and thus the gravitas that is required to draw ones attention to a newsworthy and worthwhile story is lost.
I have read many articles about the trivial use of AI, from the use of AI in constructing songs to, as ‘The Atlantic’ describes it, the ‘arms race of irrelevance between teachers and students’. It has been argued that these language-only models such as ChatGPT still are a long way off from truly emulating how people think. That’s not to say there won’t be attempts. With a lack of regulation in AI, we will fall victim to a distortion of reality. We will lose the vital human voices of academia and journalism. No, a robot cannot cure cancer. But a robot cannot also emulate the thought process of a human. Yet we are somehow giving it the power to attempt to do so.
