“Happy birthday Chat GPT …
2 years since that memorable November 30, 2022, when you burst into our lives with a disconcerting nerve.
At first, we had a good laugh.
Between your “fail” answers and your sometimes very funny “hallucinations”, we doubted your abilities, we doubted your reliability.
Then, little by little, some people started to laugh less, and I’m talking about the world of creation and content, of course.
IS AI OUR WORST ENEMY?
A brief review of the forces at work…
Translators? Deepl Pro, capable of translating 10,000 words in under 3 seconds. We don’t need the added value of proofreading.
SEO copywriters? Dispossessed of their semantic cocoons and the structure of their articles. Texts aren’t always fully UX, but as long as they climb up the Google pages, we’re happy with them.
Copywriters? In the midst of an existential crisis, challenged by the machine, always quick to slap a punchline and write “à la manière de”.
Journalists? Disoriented by the new rules of information, never learned in school.
Copywriters and blog content creators? Sometimes outright replaced from A to Z by “agents” capable of automatically creating content from self-generated keywords, laying it out on WordPress and distributing it with the click of a finger.
Graphic designers? Destabilized by automated platforms capable of “creating” 100 logos in 5 minutes.
The same goes for naming. Between the creation of a start-up and its graphic charter, there’s sometimes less than a week!
And the list goes on.
Brilliant photographers and illustrators put in the shadow of Dall-E, Midjourney, Canva, Adobe Firefly and Synthesia.
Talented voice-overs and live musicians replaced by generative AI. With Suno, I blew everyone away by “creating” a birthday song. It took me 15 minutes.
Models and actors are being replaced by virtual entertainers, as in the latest Teen Mango and Undiz campaigns.
Even the directors are worried. Coca-Cola has just remade its legendary Christmas ad in 100% AI motion, but with less emotion. A rather frosty reception, by the way, but that’s seasonal.
Yes, it was beginning to smell like a Christmas tree, or rather, the great replacement for part of the creative community.
Make what exists disappear?
Make what doesn’t exist exist?
For others, your artificial intelligence becomes an infinite playground.
IS AI OUR NEW BEST FRIEND?
Creative minds everywhere are having a field day: with FOOH (Fake Out Of Home), they’re giving life to chimeras, subways with giant eyelashes or 20-metre-high roller bags spinning down Parisian avenues. Magical.
We’re also talking about new-generation content and writing in new formats: interactive, immersive, augmented reality. Stimulating.
We’re also talking about our central role as human beings. Because in a world increasingly standardized by your pre-formatted answers, creativity and sensitivity will be more than ever at the heart of the equation. Reassuring.
Yes, there is good news.
You’ve already created a whole host of new professions, and that’s just the beginning: prompt engineers, AI trainers, data jugglers, blabla magicians…
New skills will also be needed to verify the reliability of content, assess compliance with ethics, audit the transparency of algorithms, optimize AI responses… Opinions differ from source to source, but it’s not crazy to think that 50% of the jobs of 2035 won’t exist today.
As Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, puts it: “AI won’t replace designers, but it will replace designers who don’t use AI”.
More generally, we could mention here all the promises (good or bad) that your future holds for us (beyond generative AI), especially when it’s powered by quantum computing (cuckoo Willow): eradicating diseases, living to 130, making the dead talk, solving environmental problems, erasing all the constraints of daily life thanks to your agents and assistants… But that’s for another article.
THE DARK SIDE OF THE DATA SUPER DJ
Let’s also talk about the things that make you angry: your HUGE impact on global warming: 1 GPT chat request = 10 Google requests in terms of energy and carbon footprint. In short, things are going to get hot on the planet, particularly between trans-humanists, post-humanists, anti-progressives, ecologists…
We won’t even get into the subject of democracy, the treatment of minorities, the reinforcement of inequalities and the inevitably human biases of your algorithms.
When talking about your influence on the world, Schumpeterian economists speak of creative destruction, but some philosophers speak of destruction, pure and simple. According to Eric Sadin: “We must not adapt to generative AI, but dare to forbid it”.
WHO TO BELIEVE, WHO TO FOLLOW?
The Hollywood screenwriters (the ones who wrote Terminator?) who have been protesting against their potential demise and the plundering of their works by AI?
The OECD, which predicts that 40% of jobs will be lost because of you, Claude, and the others, Gemini, Meta Llama, Mistral 2?
MIT, which predicts only 5%?
Or those enthusiastic students who swear by you and your little brothers? In 2024, 99% of them will be using AI, and 51% would find it difficult to do without it. 65% believe that the use of AI is one of the main criteria for applying to a company, ahead of its CSR policy.
These are the decision-makers and creators of tomorrow.
WHAT’S NEXT?
For our part, we at Indiana have been impressed by your meteoric rise to power. Even if the reliability of your information is borderline, not to mention confidentiality, we’ve adopted you, tamed you, hated you, prompted you. We know you don’t create, you agglomerate, you remix ad infinitum. But that alone encourages us to open our chakras, free our ideas and reinvent what makes us human: discernment, humor, subtlety, sensitivity and a sense of nuance, a deep understanding of others. In a word, true creativity, the kind that arouses emotion and leaves room for intuition.
In this moment of magnificent chaos, we’re curious to see what comes next. Perhaps the worst would be a world with YOU… but without US? You see, at first we laughed, but now we’re going to have a lot of fun, and we’re waiting for you. As it’s your birthday, it’s time to make a wish… We’re sure you’ll have lots of ideas.
And you, human to human, what do you think of all this?
- HAPPY HAPPY. Positive, techno-enthusiastic and hopeful about the fabulous prospects of AI in general and LLMs in particular.
- SO-SO. Mixed, circumspect, even vaguely worried, about your job, your life, your sanity, your future.
- THAT DIDIN’T HURT ONE BIT. It’s just a flash in the pan: after spectacular progress, the major language models have reached a plateau. Some are already going backwards. You did buy back some vinyl.
- AI-PHOBIC. Outright hostile, against, allergic to digital cats of all stripes that are going to turn us into machines, robots, tin cans.
So, A, B, C or D, how do you feel about it?