ChatGPT in Insanely good, but...

Author: Carmen Mallo (Revenue Management specialist, founder of REMS Hospitality and content creator)  

I recently spent nearly a month in my home country, visiting family. During a casual conversation with my mum, I asked if she wanted to learn how to use ChatGPT. She laughed and asked if AI could cook lunch for her. I chuckled, responding that while it couldn’t cook, it could do almost everything else. We tested it by asking it to create a poem about a man who must leave his wife to go to war. In less than two seconds, ChatGPT generated a beautifully crafted poem. My mum was astounded, and frankly, so was I.

We didn’t stop there and kept asking questions that piqued her curiosity. She grew concerned for content creators, artists, and writers, worrying about how hard it would become to distinguish between human and AI-generated content. “This is the end of humanity as we know it. Where are we heading?” she said, disheartened. I share her concerns, though I also appreciate the ways AI has made my life easier, helping me write better, work faster, and create complex formulas in minutes that would have taken me hours before.

Still, I can’t fully understand humanity’s obsession with automating everything. It seems AI is being pushed into every facet of life, making it something we are almost forced to adopt. I even recently heard about the development of an AI CEO—an emotionless machine programmed to make cost-effective decisions. In the future, when AI runs AI, humans may end up observing a parallel world that we can no longer grasp.

“But how does ChatGPT make money if it's free?" my dad asked. I explained that there’s an affordable paid version, but even that seems inexpensive for what it offers. But I don't think it’s about money anymore. The issue lies in how AI subtly makes us dependent, potentially deleting our intellectual independence. Society has always needed structure and alignment to progress, but until now, we've strived to think critically, solve problems, and engage in research that makes us complex individuals.

Now, we consume endlessly and rely on machines to generate more content, with minimal human input. AI still depends on vast amounts of human data, but one day it might rely solely on its own outputs. At that point, humans may become irrelevant, drowning in distractions and losing the ability to think deeply.

In the beginning, we used ChatGPT to check grammar, then to refine articles, and now we might even ask it to create content entirely. The irony is that we don’t publish anything until it has the AI has given its approval. This may seem like progress, but we’re not fully aware of the implications of this on our cognitive development. If people cannot perform basic tasks without AI, we’ll be in serious trouble.

And while a price hike could make AI inaccessible, the real concern is our growing inability to function independently. We trust that AI has the "best" answers and edits our writing better than we can. We're putting our self-improvement in the hands of a machine with a near-instant answer for 99.9% of our personal or professional questions.

That worries me. We often hear about the struggle to live in the present, bothered by the past and anxious for the future. Yet here we are, embracing AI’s capabilities without contemplating the long-term consequences.

I feel sharp when I tell people how much more efficient I’ve become thanks to AI. But is that truly my achievement? Would I publish this article without AI’s review? Probably not. And that realisation, in itself, is concerning.

ChatGPT is insane, but let’s be careful not to let ourselves become irrelevant.

I ideated this article and enhanced it with the help of OpenAI.