- [Narrator] This is a blank page.
The opportunities here are endless.
Maybe it's your next book, the outline of your screenplay,
your next ad campaign, or maybe it's a piece of art.
Whatever it is, this blank page is your new beginning.
It's whatever you want it to be.
It's, wait, what's happening?
What's going on?
What happened to our blank page?
(bright music)
Creatives who make a living
putting thoughts and ideas on these blank pages
have begun debating whether their existence
will be displaced thanks to the latest threat
to human creativity, ChatGPT.
OpenAI's newest technological feat
that allows users to submit any kind of prompt,
which a bot then generates
a human-like answer within seconds.
It's the same company responsible for the wildly popular
Dall-E 2 art generator that has artists fearful
of what a blank canvas means now.
Obviously, the subject of AI
and how it relates to creativity
is a vast and complicated topic,
and because we don't have time to discuss
all the intricacies in a single video,
we'll speak to the written word and specifically ChatGPT.
Now, instead of asking for an extension
on those book chapters,
can your publisher come up with a plot using AI?
Can ChatGPT be the songwriter's ticket
to stardom and "Vanity Fair" parties?
Are the minds who penned Just Do It
and ad campaigns that connect us to our purchases,
getting their pink slips any day now?
Is the person writing this very video doomed?
- Don't you mean extinct?
- [Narrator] Is human creativity in jeopardy?
Let's find out.
(upbeat music)
Machines making jobs obsolete is nothing new.
It's been happening for centuries.
The printing press put scribes out of work,
buttons put elevator operators out of work
and touchscreens have gradually replaced
many in the fast food industry.
Through it all, creativity has been left untouched,
until now.
To understand if we should all be worried,
we talked to someone whose profession
centers around the intricate play
between creativity and the world.
- I think it's, like, hard to have a strong opinion,
like, now because we don't know anything yet.
- [Narrator] That's Ben Warheit.
He's been a writer at "Late Night with Seth Meyers"
since its inception in 2014.
He's been nominated for four Emmys,
which is four more than ChatGPT
at the time of this video's publishing.
So in an effort to balance things out
and get ChatGPT a nod from the television academy,
we prompted it to write monologue jokes
in the style of "Late Night with Seth Meyers".
They were often long-winded.
They all said, "But seriously folks,"
and they lacked the one thing that's most important
to keeping your job at one of these places, jokes.
We read them all to Ben.
(chuckles)
- So, okay, first of all, it's not like, there's no jokes.
It is kind of book record-ish.
It sounds like something your mom would say at Thanksgiving,
except for the mannerisms of "Late Night,"
which is like, but seriously folks, you know?
And people don't say that anymore.
That's, like, eighties.
- [Narrator] Okay, so points for humans.
(crowd applauds)
ChatGPT in its current state
isn't going to take Ben's job yet,
but what about all the other creative jobs?
When we asked ChatGPT to write a hit pop song
about losing a loved one in the style of Taylor Swift,
it came through.
It was a little cliche
and used a lot of predictable rhyming schemes,
but give that thing to a professional music producer
to punch up and who knows, maybe it'd be a hit.
What about a Hollywood screenplay?
When we asked ChatGPT to write a script
about a basketball player who falls in love with a referee
in the style of Paul Thomas Anderson,
it gave us a pretty impressive and gripping outline
that would probably be enough
for any budding screenwriter to make work.
Obviously, there's more creative jobs out there
for the taking, and if we wanna stay one step ahead,
we'll need to better understand the enemy at hand.
So we went straight to the source
and asked ChatGPT if it has any advantages
over human thought.
It listed five, speed, consistency,
scale, memory and language understanding.
But of course the AI would tell us it has the edge.
That's just textbook confidence, respect.
(bright music)
- There's a lot of people saying,
you know, this spells the end of writing
as a skill in society.
- [Narrator] That's James Vincent.
He's a senior reporter at The Verge,
and his reporting on technology
and AI specifically is extensive.
- Who's gonna write, if they can get ChatGPT
to write it for them?
- [Narrator] ChatGPT has already been hired
by various places to write articles
and BuzzFeed quizzes at breakneck speed for no pay.
One popular news site, CNET,
hired ChatGPT to write nearly 80 stories.
However, half of them were littered with errors
and the site paused further use of the tool.
When we called on ChatGPT to write an essay
on the importance of friendship
using quotes from the characters of "Jurassic Park,"
it misattributed two of the four quotes it provided
and completely made up one of them.
Not to mention the essay was not very good.
(laughs)
- You'll have to get used to Dr. Malcolm.
- [Narrator] It can definitely get the ball rolling
when it comes to school assignments,
legal agreements and advertising slogans,
but we shouldn't just let it cook, as the kids say.
- The AI tends to replace tasks,
it doesn't necessarily replace entire jobs.
It's gonna help make certain tasks faster.
This is gonna be a fantastically useful form of technology
and we're gonna see it in all sorts of places.
It may be integrated into search engines, for example,
to help you better research topics.
One prediction is it's gonna look
like a supercharged Clippy.
You know everyone, members Clippy,
you're writing a letter, it says,
hey, I see you're writing a letter.
Can I help with that?
What if ChatGPT starts doing that instead
and says, hey, I see you're writing a letter,
I wrote it for you already.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] For now, it sounds like ChatGPT
and other technologies could be used as tools
to help with writer's block,
or even as a way to bounce ideas off a collaborator
who doesn't know why they're saying what they're saying.
If the stakes are as low as Clippy with a glow up,
I think most of us would happily take that.
It could be very helpful and save us tons of time.
ChatGPT is a mechanism that redefines
how we access information.
AI will undoubtedly transform how we access information,
what we're able to do with it, and on what time scales.
This could be groundbreaking for how we work.
Communicating knowledge
and thought creatively on the other hand, requires instinct.
One thing AI can't do by definition
is imitate the unconscious, animalistic side of our brains,
the non-intelligent intelligence.
This is the territory of the irrational and subconscious.
It's the empathy mechanism
that would have a side with people who look like us,
even when they're in the wrong.
It's the skeptical impulse, which prompts us
to ask of any knowledge we encounter,
who is telling me this and why should I believe them?
It's also the side of us that can be emotionally moved
by the source and context of information.
AI has yet to prove that it can code emotion,
character and personality to actually persuade
any one of the human logos it's learned to imitate.
The creators of this sophisticated technology
have achieved something brilliant,
but they haven't ended humanity's
defining and most valuable achievements, knowledge and art.
We can ask our machines to play with these
and imitate us as much as they want,
but they'll never be better at being us.
Ben summed it up the best.
- You have to synthesize everything
that's going on in the world
in order to connect with people.
And it's about life, it's about people.
It's about, like, connection.
It's not just about baiting and switching.
You have to know, you have to be,
like, in tune with humanity, I think.
(laughs) I hope.
(bright music)