The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: ChatGPT

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.  On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard go deep into the debut of the new machine learning tool ChatGPT, which is taking the internet by storm. How much of a game changer is ChatGPT when it comes to how we access the Internet’s treasure troves of information and use what we learn from querying ChatGPT when we communicate with one another? Janice and Rudyard explain why ChatGPT is indeed a very big deal in the annals of machine learning and why it may herald a new competitive advantage for open societies in their competition with authoritarian regimes. Listeners interested in using ChatGPT should click on the link https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt and look for the button “TRY CHATGPT” midway down the middle of the page. To access the full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast, consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website. website in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to

the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Friday Focus listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our regular weekly conversation on the big issues. and ideas shaping our world. We do this each and every Friday with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs

and internationally renowned scholar and author. And Janice, we've got crystal clear audio this week. Our apologies last week, Janice, maybe you can explain. We've got boxes, wires, microphones. Sometimes a piece goes missing. It did for me last week, so I apologize to listeners for the less than stellar audio quality. Glad everything is fixed.

And that goes right to the heart of what we're going to talk about today. Right, Rodyard? What goes wrong in a tech-dominated world? I want to start for our listeners, urge all of them this weekend to play around with the sensation that is sweeping the Internet in the last seven days called chat. So if you haven't heard about this, we're going to tell you about it right now and share with you why Janice and I think this is a really, really big deal. Roger, let me interrupt you for one minute. Just tell our listeners how they can get chat GPT. Well, go to-

How do they play with it? Go to Google. Type in chat GPT. You'll go to the OpenAI website. It's a little tricky. You've got to scroll down the page and you'll see a little button that says, demo, click on the demo button, and then it will take you to basically a screen that has a field where you can put queries in. And this is where it gets exciting. This AI, and I don't

really like that word, I prefer machine learning tool, has been trained on millions of websites. It's assimilated terabytes of information. But what's truly unique and special about it and a little bit creepy is that you can put in a very generic inquiry, like write me a biographical note for Janice Gross Stein. And it will, in paragraph form, in pretty good prose, not Pulitzer Prize winning, but pretty good pros, as good as anything you'd read on 90% of the websites out there, it will give you Janice Gross Stein's professional biography written paragraph by paragraph by paragraph. Play around. Say, write an op-ed about why Rudyard Griffiths is a bad person. It will write you a very opinionated, pointed, critical, wounding op-ed to me about why I, Rudyard-Griffis or a bad person. I've tried it. I'm a bit of a

Narcissist. So I put my own name in and there there was. Janice, I want your views on this. I think this is a moment. Something I got a tingle this week. And I felt like, wow, something big has happened with the arrival of chat GPT. I completely agree, Richard. I'm so glad you urged all our listeners to play with it because when you do, it's stunning. I'll give you one more example, which shows you what chat GPT can do. I have a colleague whose son is about to have his bar mitzvah, which is what happens in Judaism to a boy who's 13 year old. And my colleague, just type in, can you please write bar mitzvah speech for this week for, for kiddo likes hockey. And out came four paragraphs of biblical commentary connected to hockey.

Wow. Right? So you understand. And I love that story because it really shows you the power here. And what is this power based on? Rudyard? Exactly as you said, megabytes and megamo hours of training on an infinite number of websites and so, what this is, in the simplest form, is advanced computational power to connect. That's really, it is not some humanoid. Let me put it to you that way. That's what it's not. It is advanced computational power. That having been said, it's a step level change for the first time all of us can see and play with what is coming when we train machines. so that they can do things more quickly as well and in some cases better than what we can do. If I had to write that for my friend's kid, I tell you, Roger, that would have taken me five hours to do.

And this is seconds. Yeah, seconds. Yeah. And as you said, in good prose, in good prose. It'll write poetry on just about anything you want. It'll do a press release. It will write tweets for you. Supposedly, it can write code with a few simple instructions for WordPress sites.

So again, I just want to urge people play with this thing because you immediately get a sensor, as Janice just said, of a powerful technology lurking behind your screen in a way that I have never felt before. Now, Janice, a personal confession here, I'm somebody who's made my living for better or worse over the last few decades, assembling zeros and ones into pretty patterns that people liked enough to pay me for. This technology makes me really anxious because I see a lot of things that I do, write press releases, write tweets, send out emails for the monk debates, that chat GPT, I would argue, doesn't

do quite as well as I do, but it does it pretty darn well. And this is the beta, Janice. This is the earliest iteration of this technology. How worried do you think the so-called creative class to which I belong should be about this technology? Because I think many of us with white-collar job have kind of looked at the Amazon workers, the truckers, the people that have been subject to relentless automation, the effects of robotics and technology. and we thought, ah, there,

but the grace of God, I do not go because I'm in the creative class. And what I do is not going to be subject to the technological disruption that has reworked the broad swaths of the economy that I'm not part of. It's a mixed answer. You should be worried, but you should not be frantic. All right,

Richard. And this is, I think, the big story with the automation that has, been developing for decades, but we are reaching a new level of it now. Yes, chat GPT is going to take cut jobs out that have been traditionally done by the creative class, right? For sure. So just like robots on the factory floor have removed a lot of routine work from people who used to do them in person, and now you need one worker instead of 10.

on factory floors. A lot of the routine kind of things that you're talking about, Rudyard, that live inside that big tent called the creative class will change. There's no question. And we will need fewer workers. So there's a long pattern here, and there's no reason to think that the creative class is different.

We just haven't wanted to face it, but it is coming for us. There's no question about it. But remember, there's a whole set of things. that writers to take what we're talking about do beyond just assembling and writing good prose. So let me give you an example. Somebody has to verify this stuff because the reader, whom we're not talking about, or the listener, will want to know that somebody, a human, thinks that this is good stuff,

that it is not just the product of machine algorithms. So underneath this, and we've seen this again and again, there's what I call the expert function, the authoritative voice, the underlying distrust. That's what still remains. There's a trust relationship between people who listen to you, Rudyard, and when you say, this is good, read this, that's the relationship that doesn't go away. Just to Bill, I agree with that. And maybe in some ways, if we're going to think about regulation of this, that's where we ultimately should go. We should have content verified for the user so they understand that it does emerge from a machine as opposed to a human. So you can make a subject termination. But we've been experimenting the other hat I wear is running something called the hub.ca.

It's an online information site about public policy and national affairs. We've been experimenting this week with chat, GPT. we've been having it write columns for us. How's it going? On topics. This is the interesting thing. I agree. It's not as good as nine-tenths of our columnists, but it's also not bad.

And again, this is the beta version. So I wonder, Janice, what I want to ask you is what happens when this is where I got the tingle this week, where I think this isn't some distant future. This could be a matter of a couple of years where you could go on to the hub.ca, see an op-ed written by chat GPT and an op-ed by me. And in terms of the qualitative and quantitative assessment of that content, they would be indistinguishable. Yeah. Because again, you play with this thing, and I urge our listeners to do that,

It's just such a step change, as you said, on something like Google, which we're all used to. This has narrative. It's not just information. It's narrative. And that is where our human brain, I think, is easily fooled. Am I wrong, Janice? No, I think you're right. I think you're right.

And that's why when I played around this week, which I did, I was just. And as you said, this is the early version. We've known it's coming. We've been, you know, we have known this. But wow, the capacity, just think about this for a fundamentally programmed machine to write stories, to write narrative history, and to do it well, because it will get better and better, and it's going to get better very rapidly, very, very quickly, is just staggering. But the difference is when people, when I think about this, Rudyard, what kind of writing is it going to matter that we know you wrote it, not the machine? So let's take fiction.

Maybe we don't care. If it's well-crafted and well-written and we're reading fiction, we may not care that much that you wrote it or the machine wrote it. But if you're writing an opinion column and you're arguing a point or making a recommendation, I really care. I want to know who wrote that. And the machine learning is not going to be persuasive to me. That's so 2022. I guess that's what I'm thinking here is that you and I grew up in a world where we

care about these things because those distinctions were real for us each and every day. What blows my mind about chat GDP is that chat GDP, chat GPT is that I see the beginnings of the post-human era. I see the beginnings of an era where much of the cultural products that we consume from books to movies to news to social media content will be produced overwhelmingly manufactured by machines at scale with very loose and and almost ephemeral direction from humans at the top. What's interesting about Chat GPT is that you provide it with a few simple cues and then it takes over. So I just don't think we can discount the extent to which we have grown up for the better

part of the entire enlightenment in a society and a world where we endow content with meaning because it is produced by other people that we know are like us. They're hopefully rational agents that share, you know, responsibility and accountability and have emotions similar to us. This is very different. Suddenly we're moving to a moment in era where so much of what we will consume will be indistinguishable from human output, human cultural products of the past, but it will only be so loosely guided, so loosely shaped by human hands at remote, at remove from these actual cultural

products, which we will ingest. This is big. To me, this is watershed stuff. And you can't assume that the mores of the past, the values of the past, the social structures, the cultural assumptions of the human era of content will continue in an era where cultural products and content art is dominated by machine learning. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program, simply go to our website, www.The monkdebates.com.

Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year of 50 cents an episode, and we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content. Again, you can do that right now by becoming a donor to the Monk Debates at Triple W. Monk Debates with an S.com.