In the 2005 movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie Bucket’s family is plunged into poverty when his father’s job at the toothpaste factory is taken over by a robot that can screw the lids on the toothpaste tubes. For years, there has been a concern that robots would take over certain easily mechanized jobs. But most people with creative jobs like writers, artists, and musicians have assumed their jobs were safe. However, AI chatbots and art programs have become more and more complex. Recently, ChatAI has been in the news. Its bot, named Assistant, is able to paraphrase statements in different voices and complexity levels, write poetry and lyrics, and even create computer programs. Other programs create art in response to prompts. Could these programs replace human writers, artists, and musicians?
I decided to begin my investigation by conversing with the “competition.” I asked Assistant to describe itself, and it replied,
I am Assistant, a large language model trained by OpenAI. I am a machine learning model that has been trained on a dataset of human-generated text and can generate human-like text in response to prompts given to me. I can answer questions, provide information, and have conversations on a wide range of topics.
