{"id":18655,"date":"2023-01-25T09:27:54","date_gmt":"2023-01-25T09:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barazalab.com\/?p=18655"},"modified":"2023-11-27T12:38:45","modified_gmt":"2023-11-27T12:38:45","slug":"the-seemingly-clever-chat-gpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tuwele.com\/baraza_update\/the-seemingly-clever-chat-gpt\/","title":{"rendered":"The (Seemingly) Clever Chat GPT"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Curator\u2019s Desk<\/b><\/p>\n

Greetings friends:<\/span><\/p>\n

Happy new year! (I believe the year is as new as you want it to be \ud83d\ude04) I hope you had a restful end of year, and that you were able to take time to recharge. At Baraza we are in hamster mode preparing for the Africa Media Festival right now, and if you haven\u2019t got your ticket, now is the time to <\/span>secure your spot<\/span><\/a>. You can look forward to insightful panels featuring speakers drawn from across the continent, industry roundtables, curated workshops and exhibitions. Speaker confirmations are coming in fast, you can follow Africa Media Festival on the socials to keep up with our announcements.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the meantime, over the holidays I spent a lot of time experimenting with <\/span>ChatGPT<\/span><\/a>, the open, generative AI platform that is all the rage at the moment. Some of what the chatbot can come up with is both interesting and useful, such as when prompted to simplify complex ideas for an 8-year-old to understand. Others are frankly weird or just hilarious, like when prompted to write a compelling scientific argument on the benefits of humans eating glass (go ahead and look it up).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s compelling for me is how your experience using this AI depends a great deal on the questions you ask of it. Even though the bot is still under construction and so can give glitchy or inaccurate answers, in most cases the bot is limited by the user\u2019s imagination. The more zany and left-field your questions are, the more imaginative the bot can get. What does this mean for writers, artists, or anyone in the so-called creative economy? Perhaps, as my cousin said to me this week when we were discussing ChatGPT, good writers of the future will have to become good AI directors (!!!)<\/span><\/p>\n

Is that good, scary, or downright dystopian? We will discuss more at the Festival, on a panel titled, \u201c<\/span>Web 3.0, AI and machine learning for African creatives: The good, the bad, and the ugly<\/span><\/i>.\u201d What we do know for sure is that there\u2019s a very real human cost to this seemingly dazzling technology, as is always the case: a recent investigation by Time Magazine\u2019s Billy Perrigo <\/span>found<\/span><\/a> a darker side to the AI boom: that just as in the case with content moderation on social media sites, this kind of AI often relies on hidden, low-paid human workers who remain on the margins even as their work contributes to a multibillion-dollar industry.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the meantime, here\u2019s:<\/span><\/p>\n