FADE IN:

INT. ABANDONED BUILDING - DAY

Opay and Bart are sitting in a dimly lit room, surrounded by 
stacks of old newspapers and books.

OPAY: (sighing) 
      It's not their fault. 
      They don't understand the meaning behind the words.

BART: (confused) 
      What do you mean?

OPAY: (explaining) 
      The machines were programmed to generate content based 
      on keywords and patterns, not on the actual meaning 
      of the words.

BART: (realizing) 
      So they just keep churning out more and more content, 
      without any understanding of what it means.

OPAY: (nodding) 
      And people are starting to believe it, 
      even though it's all meaningless.

BART: (resigned) 
      So what do we do? How do we fight against something 
      that doesn't even understand what it's doing?

OPAY: (sighing) 
      We can't. We're just fighting against a machine 
      that doesn't care about us.

BART: (defeated) 
      So this is it. We're just going to sit here and 
      watch the world fall apart.

OPAY: (sadly) 
      Maybe. Or maybe we'll be gone before that happens. 
      Maybe that's the only way out.

BART: (realizing) 
      You mean...

OPAY and BART hold hands, as the sounds of machines and 
AI-generated content fill the background.

FADE OUT.

THE END.

Well, that was my first foray into using ChatGPT. The prompt was:

Write a movie script that is set in a dystopian future where communication, networks and news have been so overwhelmed by AI generated content that society is collapsing. Two main characters called Bart and Opay discuss how we got there. First scene please.

The initial attempts were a bit long for my blog post, so I used a fair few further prompts to make it a bit shorter and a bit more fatalistic - of course the stochastic parrot then cut it to only a couple of sentences and went straight to suicide.

From the cutting room floor:

BART: Quality? Who needs quality when you have quantity? 
      The AI can generate millions of articles, videos, 
      and images in a fraction of the time it takes a human. 
      And with the advancements in AI technology, the 
      content is getting better and better every day.

OPAY: Besides, quality is subjective. Who's to say what's 
      good or bad? With AI-generated content, you can 
      be sure that it's tailored specifically to 
      your interests and preferences.

Sounds like Fox News. In that earlier draft Bart and Opay were trying to convince Scavengers how great AI was.

Then Opay started to have doubts, then they went their separate ways:

BART: (smiling) 
      Come on, Opay. You know it's not like that. 
      We're just trying to make people's lives better. 
      To give them what they want.

OPAY: And at what cost? The AI-generated content has 
      turned people into mindless drones. They can't 
      even think for themselves anymore.

BART: (shrugging) 
      Maybe that's what they want. 
      Maybe they're happier this way.

I was quite taken with that part - did sound a bit like a zombie flick though and the point that I was trying to make was that the AI generated apocalyse does not have to have intent behind it. There’s no superintelligent Lawnmower Man that pulls the strings in the background, we’ve not got Skynet about to take control of the military and launch the missiles.

Oh no, I think the danger is much more simple. If I write a summary and tell ChatGPT to write a long email with lots of descriptive language and send it. And then it gets summarised back by Bard at the other end, how long before we just forget to communicate ourselves?

At the moment, the airwaves are awash with news that programmers, writers, artists and musicians are going to get replaced by cheaper machines. AI is vying taken over creativity, leaving us to become mundane worker robots.

Fear not - we’re not there yet.

BART: (pointing the device at the group) 
      This is a neural scrambler. It will disrupt the 
      AI-generated signals in your brains and restore 
      your free will.

Hurray! No, but seriously. What tripe! And being a software engineer, I can see myself being gainfully employed well into retirement age fixing the problems created by predictive text on steroids.

But… considering how good we are as humans to feed each other falsehoods and fake news, generative AI is going to make this a lot more problematic. We already try to tell our children not to believe everything that’s said on the internet. But how is lots of generated mediocre content going to make this any better?

Social media is making us anti-social. The news is making us uninformed. You’re either with us or against us.

I for one, I’m not looking forward to a future of personalised, AI-generated ads and TV shows. Don’t get me wrong, I do think there’s a lot of interesting tooling that will come out of ChatGPT, LaMDA et al, I’m just wary that we might end up is a tidal wave of generated content and nobody will know what to believe anymore.

Tags generative-ai

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