Do not go gentle into that good night ...

Ice Picture Frame

To date, yours truly has resisted the Siren call of ChatGPT, the AI able to generate quality writing with minimal effort. This ease of use also applies to MidJourney and DALLE-2 as all one needs to generate photorealistic images is to type in the desired set of words, the same process one uses to generate code vis a vis the AI known as GPT3.  Regarding music, Amper seems to be a viable weapon of choice, which sounds pretty damn cool I must admit. 

For you, my loyal readers, using AI in the realm of writing, however, will not be applied as it took years to learn this difficult craft, thanks in large part to The Elements of Style, in helping me to produce credible work, something ChatGBT will compromise if said tech is enabled to do the heaving lifting.

First expanded edition (1959)

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

First expanded edition (1959)

Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953

Days of Future Past/revXX

Days of Future Past/rev/revXX

This pix of the rusting Bethlehem steel plant shows a concrete past unable to be denied until said material grinds into dust, something along the lines of Osymandius ...

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

When factored into the equation of AI apps like ChatGBT, the notion of a past penned by man becomes questionable as the allure of using tech as powerful as this equates to a Faustian bargain for the ages. 

 

Frontispiece to a 1620 printing of Doctor Faustus showing Faustus conjuring Mephistophilis.
The spelling "Histoy" is agreed to be a typographical error.[1]

It has been clear for several years that artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining the ability to generate fluent language, churning out sentences that are increasingly hard to distinguish from text written by people. Last year, Nature reported that some scientists were already using chatbots as research assistants — to help organize their thinking, generate feedback on their work, assist with writing code and summarize research literature (Nature 611, 192–193; 2022).

But the release of the AI chatbot ChatGPT in November has brought the capabilities of such tools, known as large language models (LLMs), to a mass audience. Its developers, OpenAI in San Francisco, California, have made the chatbot free to use and easily accessible for people who don’t have technical expertise. Millions are using it, and the result has been an explosion of fun and sometimes frightening writing experiments that have turbocharged the growing excitement and consternation about these tools.

Faust lives ...

The big worry in the research community is that students and scientists could deceitfully pass off LLM-written text as their own, or use LLMs in a simplistic fashion (such as to conduct an incomplete literature review) and produce work that is unreliable. Several preprints and published articles have already credited ChatGPT with formal authorship.

It's all about the money/rev L

The artificial intelligence research laboratory, OpenAI, has reportedly begun rolling out a premium version of its popular AI chatbot, "ChatGPT Professional."

The premium edition will offer additional features with less unpredictable availability, better response times, and priority access for a $42 monthly membership, according to a LinkedIn post on Saturday by Linas Beliūnas, a financial technology specialist. 

The end of history as we know it? One never knows do one? - Fat Waller

TTE ...

Getty Images

Pop Sci has come up with an unusual take on Verner Vinge's concept of the Singularity whereby the acceleration of tech, particularly regarding AI, becomes so rapid, the notion of predicting how the future evolves becomes impossible, something not seriously considered to happen, if ever, for another 25+ years, a notion which no longer applies given how quickly AI is changing all disciplines requiring thought with specific emphasis given to the inherent difficulties of language translation, a skill exclusively reserved for humans, until now.

In the world of artificial intelligence, the idea of “singularity” looms large. This slippery concept describes the moment AI exceeds beyond human control and rapidly transforms society. The tricky thing about AI singularity (and why it borrows terminology from black hole physics) is that it’s enormously difficult to predict where it begins and nearly impossible to know what’s beyond this technological “event horizon.”

Many AI researchers believe that solving the language translation problem is the closest thing to producing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This is because natural language is by far the most complex problem we have in AI. It requires accurate modeling of reality in order to work, more so than any other narrow AI. Thus, the evidence that Translated has provided regarding the closing of the gap between what expert human translators and an optimized machine translation (MT) system can produce is quite possibly the most compelling evidence of success at scale seen in both the MT and AI communities.

When plotted graphically, the TTE data shows a surprisingly linear trend. If this trend in TTE continues its decline at the same rate as it has since 2014, TTE is projected to decrease to one second within the next several years, approaching a point where MT would provide what could be called “a perfect translation.” This is the point of singularity at which the time top professionals spend checking a translation produced by the MT is not different from the time spent checking a translation produced by their colleagues which doesn't require any editing. The exact date of when this point will be reached may vary, but the trend is clear.

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when ...