Note (March 26, 2023): I first wrote this list on December 3, 2022. Since then, GPT-4 has come out, and several of the points in this list are closer to happening. For example, point #2 is partly true already, thanks to Bing Chat (which runs on GPT-4).
Here are nine ways I think that AIs that generate text (like GPT-3) will have a >50% chance of changing the world for the better and worse in the next ten years:
#1: The internet will get flooded with AI-written articles, and you often won’t know if you’re reading something written by a human.
#2: Search engines will generate answers to your questions on the fly (from scratch) instead of just showing a list of websites to you and instead of using pre-extracted answers. Google will have to adapt, or it may finally lose its dominance.
#3: Cheating on school essays will become rampant, as AIs will be able to get students good grades in many classes (at negligible cost), and it will be very hard to detect such cheating since each essay will be unique.
#4: You will be able to train an AI on samples of your own writing, give it a new essay title and a bulleted list of points you want to make in the essay, and it will write a pretty high-quality essay covering all the points you listed, in a style that matches your own writing.
#5: Spam messages (and text-based phishing attacks) will become unique. Rather than sending the same message to each person, spam will be unique for each recipient. And it may even have its style adapted to what is known about each recipient (e.g., demographics).
#6: Propaganda on social media will start to become automated. Rather than bad actors having hundreds of people on their payroll to promote a viewpoint, they’ll replace them with larger swarms of human-seeming bots that each act uniquely.
#7: AIs will be fine-tuned on our own personal email corpus, and then (much of the time) you’ll be able to start with an automatically generated first draft of email replies rather than having to write emails from scratch or receiving mere sentence-level suggestions.
#8: The text of ads will get automatically edited/rewritten by AI to be fine-tuned to different audiences to help maximize clicks.
#9: AIs will start being used in education as digital private tutors to explain concepts to students, re-explain things and simplify explanations when a student is confused, point out mistakes made by students, etc.
We’re entering a wild time when it comes to AI. Its effects on our lives will be felt more and more, to say the least.
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I came from your newsletter. Great list and I agree with you on most of the predictions.
But I have a request can you write a post about how the creative/knowledge workers would survive in such world?
Thank you in advance 💖
The creatives have the most to gain from this technology. For example: the pope puffer coat. A creative was the original point of inception for a reproduction of viral pope puffer coat scenarios. What I’m getting at, it’s reducing time required for an idea to come alive.