Are we close to a robot takeover?

With easily accessible artificial intelligence becoming a reality with the likes of ChatGPT, Adam Hart asks what that means for Shooting Times

Five years ago, as a fresh-faced 18-year-old, I turned up at the Shooting Times office in Farnborough, Hampshire, for a week’s work experience. The Editor, Patrick Galbraith, showed me into the building, introduced me to the team and immediately got me working on an article titled Is fieldcraft a dying art? After an enjoyable week of interviewing and writing, I submitted my copy to Patrick and waited like a schoolboy outside the headmaster’s office for him to read it.

To my great joy, Patrick emerged from his office and said, “Good work Adam, it’ll be in next week’s issue.” I couldn’t believe I was being paid for writing something. “This is the career for me,” I thought. Half a decade and a journalism degree later, I’m still writing for Shooting Times, though it doesn’t take me a week to write an article any more.

However, that was before artificial intelligence (AI) changed everything through ChatGPT, the AI chatbot taking the world by storm. So what is ChatGPT and how does it work? To find out, I asked the chatbot to explain its methods to me in layman’s terms. It said: “I am a computer programme that can understand and generate natural language. I have been trained on a massive amount of text data which has helped me learn the patterns and structures of language.