In my early 30s, an editing role came up at the BBC. It involved aggregating news content for their Australian site: deciding what went where on the home page and adding a few original stories. I was unsure whether to apply and approached a friend who worked for Google for advice. Don’t do it, they said. This is a job that will, one day soon, be overtaken by AI.
AI isn’t yet editing our news sites. But we’re getting dangerously close. On November 30, 2022, the research laboratory OpenAI launched Chat-GPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot. ChatGPT can pass the bar exam, write fiction and, yes, produce newspaper articles.
The chatbot marks a rate of progress in AI that is so fast, and so unprecedented, that it poses the question: Does this mark the advent of a new form of intelligence on earth? And, if so, what does that mean for the human race?
Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at Cornell University, believes that ChatGPT is “equivalent to human intelligence. Language in general is
