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Let's adopt new technology, but do it carefully

I’ve been aware of the rise of artificial intelligence, or AI for short, but until I heard a brief story from a tech guru on a television segment that my ears perked up.

They were talking about technology called ChatGPT that is able to spit out 500 written words on any subject in a few seconds.

Naturally, I immediately began wondering if it could write a small-town newspaper column. Could I put this technology to work for me and land numerous other column gigs across the globe and finance my retirement? Or would it put me out of the part time gig I have now?

Most of the questions raised in the piece pertained to whether or not kids everywhere were already using and abusing the technology on term papers and book reports. After all it is apparently a free app and all you need to do is register for an account.

The simple fact that I heard it on a morning television broadcast and not by reading it somewhere is a rather big clue as to how successful it might become. If written language were still gathering steam these days I might still be a newspaper publisher.

But I did want to find out more so I began actually reading about it online.

Apparently there are divided camps over ChatGPT and other similar programs. Some colleges and schools have already banned it outright. Others, I’ll call them freedom of artificial speech proponents, believe it needs to be incorporated into our lives and say we’ve probably already opened Pandora’s Box on this thing.

One of the scariest of stories about ChatGPT was about its recent success in taking the most common national medical exams. It claimed that a score of 50% was easily achieved and 60%, which is usually the approximate passing mark, could be achieved pretty regularly.

I don’t know which scares me more, the fact that folks using AI might get a medical license, or that my doctor might have gotten his shingle with a score of 60%.

One college student used his holiday break to create a new app to keep ChatGPT in its place by using its own free technology to analyze how likely it was that any particular piece of text was created using AI. He doesn’t think the technology should be banned, just held in check.

Reportedly Elon Musk tweeted something to the effect “Homework has just been blown up,” on the subject.

I can understand where he and others are coming from when you stop to think that school-based writing is simply a model for teachers to test a student’s ability to research, comprehend and explain different subjects.

I would be a little skeptical of all this tech except I just finished reading through the Bible in a year using the audio feature in my Bible app. A few years ago the biggest church challenge for me was not to forget my Bible on the way out the door. Now it’s always on my phone and in my pocket.

Then again, my spell check did alert me to having misspelled ChatGPT over and over in this column.

I say adopt technology, but do it carefully.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]

 
 
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