Yesterday, before leaving work, I discussed the impact of chatGPT with my colleagues, which resulted in this "rambling".
This topic has recently been discussed by people from various industries. As someone who has been involved in the field of artificial intelligence for over ten years, I was also shocked by chatGPT.
The pace of technological advancement far exceeds that of humans. Half a year or a year ago, we were generally concerned that the AI boom was nearing its end. Most technologies in the fields of image, video, translation, and speech had already been implemented. Technologies that had not been implemented were still in the research stage, and it might take another 5-6 years or even more than 10 years for them to be developed, following the historical pattern of previous "winters". However, the emergence of chatGPT seems to have changed this perception. The appearance of chatGPT and midjourney has injected a shot of adrenaline into the development of artificial intelligence. Moreover, this shot of adrenaline has not only been injected into industry professionals but also into almost everyone in society. I once read an article discussing chatGPT on the WeChat public account "Exploration and Debate". Overall, due to its involvement in the field of human language, which is considered a symbol of wisdom, people both love and worry about chatGPT. They love it because it can improve productivity, but they are afraid it will take away job opportunities.
When I chose my college major more than ten years ago, I had never heard of the term "artificial intelligence". I wanted to study intelligent science and technology. I ended up accidentally studying automation, which happened to have a direction in artificial intelligence. At that time, artificial intelligence was not a popular discipline. There was very little data, computing power was limited, and there were not many good applications. Go was considered an impossible task, and research in automation was all labeled as "pattern recognition". When it came time to choose a direction in my third year, out of several hundred students in the department, less than 10 chose the artificial intelligence direction.
In the first few years of my graduate studies, artificial intelligence gradually became more known due to deep learning. When AlphaGo came out in 2016, artificial intelligence became the most popular major. The neural network course taught by my former advisor went from having only 30 students to not being able to fit all the students in the largest lecture hall on campus.
From my insignificant experience, I can clearly feel the arrival of the artificial intelligence boom and the rapid progress in this field. It seems that in an instant, previously unattainable fields such as image recognition, machine translation, and speech recognition have become common technologies that are everywhere.
Therefore, after the appearance of chatGPT, even though it currently has various shortcomings, we worry about what the situation will be like in 1 year or 5 years. We can't even imagine what it will be like decades from now.
We discussed the issue of consciousness. Currently, we generally believe that machines do not have consciousness. They do not have their own thoughts and only provide answers according to our needs. However, what would happen if we give them a very broad question? For example, if a robot integrates chatGPT and we tell it, "You need to build an office building. You need to independently purchase the materials required for construction through program structures, generate control programs to control body movements for physical labor, and understand the intentions of people and persuade them through communication." In this situation, chatGPT can completely behave like a conscious being and achieve our goals step by step according to its own designed plan. From "omniscience" to "omnipotence," we don't know how far away it is.
What is creativity? Some say that creativity is the combination of various ideas. According to this definition, chatGPT is a creative master, generating its own interpretations based on knowledge from the entire internet. Similar to creativity, humans have "flashes of inspiration" and "emergence". ChatGPT may not currently possess this sudden inspiration, but we don't know if it will appear in the future.
Researchers may be safe for now because chatGPT is trained on existing human knowledge, and the goal of researchers is to discover unknown knowledge. Therefore, the research field is still safe until chatGPT can independently conduct research and discover new knowledge. However, how long this safety can be maintained, I think everyone is uncertain.
Although many people oppose the further development of technologies like chatGPT, just like Bitcoin, once a technology appears, it will not disappear for no reason. We should still think more about how to utilize chatGPT rather than how to block it because it cannot be stopped.