MACHINE LEARNING

Google took our memory... could AI take away our creativity? As ChatGPT grows in popularity, Ceri Radford asks what will happen to the mind if plays, lyrics and even birthday cards become as easy to generate as searching online for directions

- Ceri Radford

For those of us born before about the year 2000, our memories worked differently. We knew phone numbers off by heart. Facts. Dates. The best way to get from Manor House to Marble Arch. The viewing schedule for Neighbours. Then along came Google and smartphones and suddenly all the information you ever needed was in your pocket. I'm not saying we became giant walking scaleless goldfish, but scientists generally agree that our memories changed. Fast forward a couple of decades from now, and we will probably look back at 2023 as a similar turning point in the human brain, but this time for creativity.

In November, OpenAI released on an unsuspecting world ChatGPT, an artificially intelligent chatbot that can do everything from write a (dubious) song lyric in the style of Nick Cave to pass an MBA exam and pontificate about the nature of consciousness. Type in a creative brief and voila, an immediate response is generated. It has since become the fastest-growing web platform in history, with an update called GPT-4 adding to its eerie power in March 2023.

I've asked ChatGPT to do a lot for me. I've had it write me a limerick about pizza and a letter to my kid's school, as well as a short story in the literary style of the New Yorker magazine using a bird as a metaphor for death. "In the twilight of a winter's day, the old man walked along the banks of the river, lost in his own thoughts," the story begins. "He watched as the last vestiges of light vanished from the sky, and the trees bowed their heads, as if in reverence to the approaching night." The results are instant and not terrible. It's like dark magic. And this is a technology in its infancy. As a creative person, I'm both mesmerised and appalled.