In the book, Only Humans Need Apply (2016), the authors identify five ways that people can work with machines. They call it ‘stepping’. We are seeing an increasing need to do what they call ‘stepping in’ or using machines [and software] to augment work. In GPT-3 through a glass darkly I used the McLuhans’ media tetrad to examine this form of machine learning, which is all over the media today.
GPT-3
- Extends each voice & mimics creativity
- Obsolesces copy-writing and essays so that human insight becomes a luxury
- Retrieves the polymaths of the European Renaissance so that the best writers must be multi-talented to earn a living
- Reverses into mass deception and provides answers without real questions behind themsee quote below
We may be in a ‘golden age’ of AI, as many have claimed. But we are also in a golden age of grifters and Potemkin inventions and aphoristic nincompoops posing as techno-oracles. —Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 2022-12-01
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