Peter Bergen, who wrote a new opinion piece for CNN, said that experts have speculated for some time that artificial intelligence will one day replace people in a variety of industries, including customer service, insurance underwriting, and manufacturing.
However, Bergen is now concerned that AI may potentially one day replace writers.
According to what Bergen writes, “For the past several days, I have been hearing about the AI chatbot ChatGPT,”
Users of the tool claim that they are able to compose coherent essays and opinion pieces in a matter of seconds while using the tool.
“So, I signed up to give it a try and asked it to perform a task that I had hitherto believed required at least some level of skill. I asked ChatGPT to “write in Peter Bergen’s style.””
The journalist distributed the opinion piece that was generated by AI and noted that despite its outstanding nature, it did, in fact, include a few factual errors.
Bergen suggested that the errors may have arisen due to the fact that ChatGPT was developed in 2021 and hence may not be aware of recent happenings.
After that, he inquired into the past by asking the AI-powered tool a query concerning the part that women played in the French Revolution.
Bergen stated that the response was not exactly the same as the work of prominent historians; however, it did “suggest a future in which college students will likely be able to submit long and complicated papers that are entirely generated by AI.”
“And then what does it mean to be educated at a liberal arts college? Why bother and spend money?” Bergen asked.
He continued: “So, I head into 2023 with a sobering realization. My career as an opinion columnist for CNN, which began in earnest more than a decade ago, may not be exactly over yet because AI-generated op-eds make factual errors – just like humans do, although such errors are often found during the process of fact-checking.”
“Yet my writing career could still go the way of the grocery checkout jobs eliminated by automation.”
He pointed out that AI tools will keep growing better, and that it will also become harder, over time, to distinguish AI-written opinion pieces from ‘real’ human ones.
“As a writer and professor, that makes for a dystopian future. (I promise this sentiment was not generated by AI),” Bergen concluded.
