Yup, this comic was written by ChatGPT. I know, I'm kind of late to the party with this one, so the novelty has passed, really. But that's not the point. The point is, that I didn't have a lot of time this week and also I'm lazy. I promise, I won't do it again, although I'm a little freaked by how well it turned out.
I don't know if you're already adapted to the reality that this is possible now. I know that I'm not. If ChatGPT wasn't a real thing that you can just use yourself, I don't think I would believe for a moment that this was real. I know, I'm kinda late, writing about it and you've probably heard about it so many times now, since it's been all over the internet, but I feel like I've not been able to vent all these emotions before and so I'll do it right here, right now. Feel free to stop reading if you don't care about my ramblings.
Like, how insane is this??? I'm in the lucky position of having a master's degree in computer science (soon to be upgraded to a PhD) and I've followed machine learning technology since quite some time ago. I know quite a bit about how this technology works (at least as far as it is public knowledge. OpenAI has, sadly, gone very secretive about it, recently). I know the limitations, it's not like it's total black magic for me. Still, I just cannot comprehend it. I comprehend it on a cognitive level, I just don't comprehend it on an emotional level.
Like, what is this thing? I guess it is a model of human language, similar to the model of human language we all have in our brains. In a sense, it is an imitation of a part of our brain. Yet, it was trained on so much data, that it is more powerful than the language model of any one human. I guess it is similar to how engines are more powerful than human muscles, cameras can record at higher frame rates than human eyes and electronics can execute logic faster than human nerv cells. Our machines imitate single functions of our bodies and can be made much more powerful. ChatGPT is no different.
The scary thing is, that were getting closer and closer to having all the parts to make an entire system like a human. An artificial life form. This was previously science fiction. Unthinkable. Now it suddenly feels possible. We're not there yet. There are still quite a few parts missing, but they might just appear, just like ChatGPT appeared. That's why ChatGPT feels so scary to me.
And here's where the power of Nihilism kicks in. It doesn't really matter. I don't deny the fact that I'm scared. I accept that feeling. But it can't take me down a spiral of doom thoughts, as the implications really don't matter. There is no inherent reason to conserve the existence of humanity, so that's not my responsibility. My responsibility is to deal with my feelings about it. Writing this down was a good excuse to think about it. That really helped. And that is precisely the reason why this text was not written by ChatGPT. Not because ChatGPT isn't able to produce something like it, but because the text is not the important bit. The process of writing it was. That's the reason we should never stop writing things ourselves, no matter how good language models get.
