AI

01/12/2023

Is right now an okay time to feel lost?

AI is a serious tool. I don't know how many of you have played with ChatGPT over the past month, but it's insane. A friend who works in tech told me that he's been using it to learn programming languages at "3 times" the speed compared to his progress before. The ability with which it can gather and organize the relevant information a person is seeking, and to do so in detail, is incredibly powerful. I've used it to find errors in gdscript, generate ideas for small business, and learning languages. Heck, I even used it to write the basic skeleton layout for this website, and here we are now!

AI is incredibly powerful, and it's leaving me feeling like I've been rendered somewhat useless. My professional background is in the arts and content creation: I create and sell (and sometimes license) images for a living. As AI art generation became more prominent, my career prospects as an artist - which aren't so great to begin with, but I'll talk about that on another day - felt as if they were closing in even further. I decided that it might be time to start working on the backup plan: learning to program.

I began learning in November, and then in December, ChatGPT was released. It showcased its powerful ability to not only understand and reference numerous languages, but to write actual code. Some of that code was production worthy, though most of it came with bugs that needed to be hammered out. Nonetheless, it showed how powerful it was, and its potential to replace programmers in the future. Now everywhere I look, it seems like any career that I would have an interest in pivoting towards could be easily replaced by AI in a decade (most likely less than that.)

Now, Microsoft has (or is going to) invest $10 Billion into OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT - itself based on the GPT-3 language model. GPT-4, the next generation of language model, is said to be 100 times as powerful as GPT-3. So I guess studying to become a programmer simply for the pay might not be the safest option afterall. Maybe I can fall back onto writing instead? Well, according to Alex Hermozi, GPT-4 can already, "write a 60,000 word book from a single prompt." It's some pretty solid existential crisis material for professionals in many fields, and it has left me wondering what my future will look like.

On a brighter note, I look forward to all the cool projects I'll be able to create with it, even though most of what I make (or what the AI makes for me) won't be very saleable, when anyone will be able to produce the same content as well. Is that a good thing? In some ways, yes! But when you anchored your career onto your creative abilities and craftsmanship, the open sea feels a whole lot rougher than it used to.

- Onio

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