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We need to face the Truth of ChatGPT
Why the release of ChatGPT is akin to the Manhattan Project, and yet we’re acting as if it is a toy
We’re not taking the release of ChatGPT seriously, and we may live to regret it. If you’re like me, you’ve seen dozens if not hundreds of social media posts and emails with cute and hopeful posts about ChatGPT, blogposts and traditional media stories about the exciting opportunity horizon it opens up. All of which obscures for the post-truth challenge it poses: a world in which we cannot trust what we read, what we see, what we hear.
We need to take the release of ChatGPT (and Large Language Models or LLMs in general) as we did the Manhattan project. The ability for a computer to communicate at hyperspeed and with unbounded digital reach has, in my opinion, as far reaching consequences as Nuclear Energy, a powerful tool useful in highly controlled environments, yet extremely dangerous when let loose.
Our very societies are based on built around our ability to communicate with one another. There is a reason community and communication are nearly one and the same, a reason why nationalities developed around national tongues. A reason why the story of the Tower of Babel resonates till this day. Our very cultures cannot exist without a shared basis of linguistic…