Examine, a free weekly newsletter covering science with a sceptical, evidence-based eye, is sent every Tuesday. Below is an excerpt – sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.
When British sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, he was thinking of UFOs. But the phrase came to mind as I played with OpenAI’s latest trained model, ChatGPT.
First, I commanded ChatGPT to write me a script of computer code to automate a tedious piece of research. Then I had it produce a script for Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, but with the instruction that all the movie’s horses should be replaced by extremely tiny horses. Here’s an excerpt of a key scene, with Archy and Frank (who are real characters in the movie) and a horse named Tiny Tim (who was definitely not in the movie) under German fire:
Archy: (clutching his arm in pain) I’m fine… but Tiny Tim…
Frank looks at the tiny horse, who is still cradled in Archy’s arms. Despite the injury, the horse still looks alive, its tiny eyes filled with courage and determination.
Frank (with admiration): Look at him. He’s a little fighter.
The whole experience feels magical. An artificial intelligence that can turn my dumb joke into a convincing movie script! Watching OpenAI’s rapid advances over the past few years – conversational AI, dominance in a variety of video games, surpassing humans at writing computer code, making new artworks based on user requests – it’s easy to think AI is coming of age.
An image generated by AI DALL-E to illustrate a story about the promise and perils of AI.Credit:DALL-E
But speak to AI scientists and they have a different take. ChatGPT is impressive, “but it’s still dumb,” says AI researcher and director of CSIRO’s Data61, Professor Jon Whittle. He says it applies a brute-force approach to AI – and we may be nearing the limits of where that approach can take us.
Is AI coming of age - or starting to reach its limits?
Examine, a free weekly newsletter covering science with a sceptical, evidence-based eye, is sent every Tuesday. Below is an excerpt – sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.
When British sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, he was thinking of UFOs. But the phrase came to mind as I played with OpenAI’s latest trained model, ChatGPT.
First, I commanded ChatGPT to write me a........
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