ChatGPT Is an Answer to the Wrong Question

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Way back in July 2023, the University of Montana revealed that ChatGPT had tested in the top one per cent for original creative thinking, relative to US college students. Are you surprised?

Generative AI such as ChatGPT covers systems that create new text, images, videos, etc. from prompts. There is much debate about the technology, but I am not sure we are asking the right questions.

Nothing new?

Technology has always changed our lives.

With the Neolithic Revolution agriculture wrested us from hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Regular food and permanent settlements brought evolved societies and radically new ways of living.

We know the Industrial Revolution transformed the world order. And we are each familiar with how the smartphone has recast our own lives.

But generative AI feels (I use the word with purpose) a little different.

Time to be more human

Inventions such as the plough and the steam engine liberated us from manual labour, granting us time. Likewise for medicine, food, and energy technologies. We had control: we made use of these opportunities to enrich human lives.

In a ‘prudently optimistic’ narrative, the authors of Legal Practice in the Digital Age, partners at British firm Shoosmiths, show how AI-savvy lawyers will find more chances to apply uniquely human EQ (and so trump their Luddite peers).

This argument applies beyond the law and I agree: digital technology may, in theory, free us from humdrum labour to harness our unique assets as human beings. The Shoosmiths straplne ‘For what matters’ makes me think of human creativity.

AI generates, very well

Whilst the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking used by Montana do not capture all that human imagination and creativity entail, the one per cent statistic surely presages what it is to come, at least for purposes of ‘practical’ creativity.

Clearly, we are not there yet, as Kyle Chayka of the New Yorker discovered when he asked a company to create an AI bot to replace him as a writer.

Still, before long AI will write copy good enough for a corporate brochure; it will craft a CV stuffed with keywords to sate its algorithm brothers. Machines will spit out student essays as well as articles for respected magazines.

AI doubles will allow sequels after an actor’s death. One day we may even read the long-lost 155th sonnet of Shakespeare. (That said, full-blown novels may take more time, as this nonsense on Amazon’s best-seller lists shows.)

Question of value

In such creative endeavours, technology can save us time or, if you prefer, ‘replace’ us. And, as the months roll on, AI will borrow, or plunder, enough of human experience to make its artefacts better and better.

Technology is moving at pace, inspired by a sense of adventure, optimism, and hope; or riding the coat-tails of consumer apathy, investor greed, and blind stupidity – again, as you wish.

The question remains: as AI picks up more and more of our creative labour, what space is left for us as human beings? Be clear: technology cannot resolve this dilemma for us, for in this case we already know the answer.

We know what is convenient and fast and cheap. We know what is easy and efficient and profitable. We know what is shiny and new, and we are beginning to see what is possible.

With AI, the question is not ‘Can it?’ but ‘Will we?’

What do you cherish?

The future of AI, of creativity, and possibly of our world will be settled not by contracts Hollywood negotiates for AI doubles, by whether Charlie loses his job, or by whether ‘Emma Thomson’ convinces us with Mein Kampf.

We answer the challenge of AI, and reframe the worries above, by reflecting on the kind of world we want to live in. And in doing so, we agree with ourselves what it means to be human. This is how we gain control and enrich lives.

This is a question of values. If we hold fast to our prevailing obsession with efficiency, profit, convenience, and ease, if we see value merely in the outputs, then the space for human creativity, and for people, will diminish.

If on the other other hand we rediscover the value that inheres in the creative process, and celebrate the messiness and unique meaning this imparts to our experiences of things created, then we might enjoy the best of both worlds.