Editor’s Letter – Jan/Feb 2024
I’m conscious that this print magazine has a lot of AI content. I’m also conscious that this can come across a bit like those print magazines in the early 2000s all about the internet and the new websites to visit. I found that ironically amusing at the time and now I am probably complicit in a similar thing. And while the internet disrupted how we got our information, I’m not sure if we can comprehend yet the true disruptive nature of the latest advancements in AI but a print publication is probably not the greatest platform to capture the pace of those advancements. I do think that “slower media” like books, newspapers and magazines has a profoundly more important role to play moving forward.
In the same way that a lot of us (myself included) have handed over elements of our mental well-being and anxiety levels to the connected world, to algorithms that are built to manipulate dopamine levels so that we hang around social feeds longer, I’m worried that the latest LLMs are also encroaching on human mental autonomy. I think it is important to mention at this point that I am an obsessive techhead and I love the genius behind generative AI so don’t write me off as a complete Luddite just yet. I have noticed though just how willing so many people are to just hand over what should be personal cognitive processes to the likes of ChatGPT. I’ve spoken to people who are using it not only to write letters to loved ones but also to describe what they might enjoy about a job position that they are applying for. So hang on a moment, we would rather hand over aspects of what should be a personal reflection to an algorithm that breaks words into integers and predicts out of a large database of learned integers what is most likely to come next?
I have also seen a wave of press releases and article submissions that have quite clearly come from a couple of prompts into an LLM. I’m all for using AI to reduce manual tasks so that we can spend more time doing the more fulfilling ones but don’t at the same time hand over the very things that we should spend more time doing. If you have to ask ChatGPT why you might enjoy a new job maybe you have the answer before you’ve even given the prompt. Just take a moment to think about it and write it down.
I think it will be both frightening and fascinating when new LLMs are trained on the flood of content produced by LLMs as we detach ourselves from that process of cognitive and thoughtful and considered information. As opposed to the danger of AGI taking over as the most intelligent species maybe we just become dumber.
Anyway, this brings me back to the magazine, occasionally it’s good to turn off the phone, the computer and other connected devices and just relax and read without feeding an algorithm or being distracted into another rabbit hole and more importantly to digest and think. It’s the human thing to do.
