Don’t be afraid of ChatGPT, it’s just another innovation we’ll learn to love

As more and more people begin to experiment ChatGPT, we’re seeing a range of responses ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, and that provide some insight into how we react to innovation.

At one end of the scale there’s a full-on panic: the New York City Department of Education has taken the decision to ban the use of ChatGPT by students and teachers; a pointless measure because there is no way to implement it. Similarly, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), one of the most important conferences on the subject, has said it will not accept ChatGPT-generated texts, unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis. Again, another meaningless prohibition. Meanwhile, China, sticking to its usual line, forbids any media generation tool if it lacks a watermarking system to identify the origin of its production.

The sudden appearance and meteoric popularity of a fool-proof tool capable of writing texts that can convincingly impersonate a person is generating another iPhone moment, with an additional detail: it is available, for the time being without limitations, to anyone. But what we need to be asking ourselves is whether it makes sense to panic about a tool that will soon be as widespread as Excel.