Are we heading towards one creative mind?
I have recently been reading some Medium articles that put a very distributing thought in my mind. They brought up many concerns about the future of Medium, but one point stood out: What if we are approaching the end of the era of individual creativity and moving towards some sort of cyber hive-mind, the sum of all the intellectual currents of humanity?
With ChatGPT one can generate entire articles from feeding in a simple premise. When people can do things quicker it’s hard to resist the urge to cut out the middleman. There’s the question of ownership of the content. Who should take credit for it; the user, the language model (eg: OpenAI) or both? We are heading into murky territory.
With the widespread public adoption of AI, could this trend gain even more traction?
School students already regularly try to get away with plagiarising articles wholesale from the Internet to present as their own class assignments. Is using a language model doing the same thing?
This leads me to the current state of the Medium platform. Numerous authors have started raising their voices about the permitting of AI content on the website and some publications have even put rules in place to prohibit its submission.
Can these reactive measures stem the tide and slow the inundation of digital media with AI content. A lot of aspiring and established writers hope that this will indeed be the outcome, in order for writing to continue to be a worthwhile vocation for the majority who pursue it.
It may work for the time being, but like any cutting-edge technology it will eventually make itself part of our interconnected reality in some way or another whether we like it or not.
How we should adapt to this reality is anyone’s guess.
