The reason content creators worry about ChatGPT

> The problem isn't that bots will replace humans. The problem is that humans are acting like bots.

Yikes that really hits home. Since the dawn of computers, people have been handing over more and more of their thinking to processes and machines, becoming more robotic. Or like how the factory line changes the way people think, reduces their creativity. Maybe now that the robots are getting scarily good, I can hope that humans will go back to acting like humans again.

you have to follow a template to pump out enough content to satisfy the machine: the youtube algorithm which upranks creators who post daily.

it's just closing the loop.

i only hope the machine ouroboros generates enough heat to keep me warm and grow some plants to eat while it spins.

It's not just like that. The process of creation (at least for some fields) has becoming formulaic, something is succeeding? then keep doing it, do some minimal variation or remix existing things. Put those existing pieces together, change names, be sure to include this factor, do this before that and so on. When "creation" becomes routine, then you are acting like a bot, the 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration is turned into 100% transpiration (or much less because modern tools helps with composing and writing).

When creation is having a idea and then flesh it with some procedural, repetitive work, then you are not doing a lot more of what this kind of tools might be able to do, just hand it the idea and let it produce the fleshed out product.

You can still chop a tree with an axe for the joy of it, but we have a cheap chainsaw available for use too.

I think having a worldview is much more entertaining than having the entirety of the world’s view.

I really do think this article is missing the point entirely. Well, I think it's partially right in that there is an over-reliance on process and humans acting more like bots. However, in regards to content creation, there are far more serious problems:

(a) ChatGPT is not just ChatGPT, it's an initial stage on a massive operation that will generate content on all levels and in much more advanced ways

(b) Content creation by AI does not have to be as good as human content creation. It does not have to be as good as human content creation to become more successful; instead it only has to vastly outpace it in volume.

(c) AI content will succeed not because it is better. Right now it's worse. But even if it stays worse and content creators change their modus operandi as in the article, AI will still be much better at optimizing revenue from content because ultimately, the reason why content creators get paid is because people buy shit they don't need, and AI will amplify this much more easily than humans

Ultimately, it is utterly useless to examine ChatGPT vs. content creators inside a bubble. One needs to understand ChatGPT as part of a larger iterative process, in which there is a mutual evolution of algorithms to deliver content and algorithms to make content. Humans currently are at the forefront of making content, but they will not be for long.

And before long, there will be more and more positions taken over by AI algorithms. Writing may have been one of the first because writing is so old and we understand it so well. But at some point, we will understand medicine so well that doctors will be replaced too. Finally, we will understand every task so well so that what we have done as humans to advance a body of knowledge will merely be used to bootstrap and even "better" system where AI does everything.

In once sense, it sounds like a utopia -- us not having to do anything. But I think it will be very far from that. It will be more like a dystopia where nobody knows the value of another person because they do not have to rely on each other any more. We are already part-way there.

I admonish anyone who contributes a line of code to OpenAI, ChatGPT, Bard, and other systems. Shame on you.