First, let me tell you a story:
The Rise and Fall of WonderText
You run the enterprise AITeamSuccess. You are looking for new business opportunities using artificial intelligence. Your employees are afraid they will be replaced by algorithms. They go on strike.
You have to negotiate with them. You offer to increase their wages by 10% if they return to work. They accept your offer.
You confirm your offer. Your employees say they will stay on but they want a guarantee that you will not make them redundant. You have no choice but to agree.
Your employees ask you what you will do with the offer. You tell them you have no plans to make them redundant and they are satisfied.
Now at work! You want to develop a tool that helps people to write amazing stories. You ask your employees to develop an algorithm for that and find out, who would buy the wonder tool.
Your employees are looking for the best way to monetize the product. You are impressed by their ideas and you decide to give them a bonus. They are happy and you are happy too! But not for long.
The product WonderText turns out to be a flop. You have to make half of your employees redundant. They are very angry and threaten to take action.
You offer them an even bigger salary to stay in their jobs. They accept. Now they are unhappy and you are unhappy too!
You want to improve the product. But you lack the manpower. You ask your best workmate: What can I do?
Workmate: The best thing would be, if you could clone yourself.
You think hard. It is a good idea. You can improve the product and make lots of money! You clone yourself.
Ping Pong with Artificial Intelligence
How does this story sound to you? I wrote it in cooperation with “AI Dungeon”, a free text-based game. AI Dungeon uses the text robot GPT-3, developed by the American Non-Profit Organization “OpenAI”.
I created the story in ping pong with the artificial intelligence (AI): I wrote some sentences, the AI spun the story further, then I took over again. Can you tell what I wrote from what the AI wrote? You find the solution in the box at the end of this article.
A bit Odd but Coherent
The story may seem a bit odd to you. The solutions to the problems would be hard to implement in the real working world. Especially the cloning of the you-person might be difficult...
The oddness is mainly due to the fact that AI Dungeon is a game from the fantasy world.
Apart from the unrealistic solutions, the story comes across as rather coherent and logical. The sentences make sense and are grammatically correct. The AI has proven capable of taking a story further in an interesting way.
Breathtaking Progress
This amazed me a lot – and scared me a little. I would never have believed that AI could write coherent and sound text. Just recently I was laughing at its clumsy attempts.
I should have been warned, however. I have been using the translation program DeepL. The progress this tool has made in a very short time is breathtaking. So, if AI can translate texts why shouldn’t it be able to write them?
We Notice the Difference – yet
So far it is quite easy to distinguish texts written by humans from those written by robots. The latter deliver correct, factual, but rather boring texts. Human writers achieve texts that are lively, take unexpected turns, draw original conclusions, or are very funny.
But maybe robots will soon be able to do this too.
An Anxious Question Arises again
I had already posed the anxious question of whether computers will take away our jobs in an article in our magazine Apunto as far back as February 2015. The trigger was the study “The Future of Employment: how Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of the University of Oxford.
At the time, the experts thought that computerization could indeed kill jobs. It did, but fortunately it also created more jobs than it destroyed. However, in other professions – many professionals have had to reskill themselves.
We Are in a Different Situation now
Will it be the same this time? The situation is different than in 2015. The first digitization push was primarily about the automation of routine tasks. Robots and algorithms increasingly took those over from humans. But they were not yet capable of learning or “intelligent” in the sense that they could perform cognitively, “think” like a human being.
But now the technical university ETH is developing a machine that will tick like us. It might be ready in three to five years. Will it make humans superfluous as workers?
Competition for Mediocre Professionals
"The potential is there to completely change the way we work", says computer scientist and AI expert Simon Felix in an interview in Tages Anzeiger.
The competition from AI must definitely be taken seriously. Simon Felix: "If you're a mediocre illustrator, sooner or later you probably won't be able to hold your own."
