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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Technology
James Bradley

AI isn’t about unleashing our imaginations, it’s about outsourcing them. The real purpose is profit

Bob Dylan George Floyd ChatGPT Wikipedia
Man silhouette, Dall-e 2 logo on smartphone. OpenAI Dall-E 2 AI artwork in background
‘When we make something, the end product isn’t the only thing that matters. In fact it may not even be the thing that matters most.’ Photograph: Rokas Tenys/Alamy

Back in 2022, when ChatGPT arrived, I was part of the first wave of users. Delighted but also a little uncertain what to do with it, I asked the system to generate all kinds of random things. A song about George Floyd in the style of Bob Dylan. A menu for a vegetarian dinner party. A briefing paper about alternative shipping technologies.

The quality of what it produced was variable, but it made clear something that is even more apparent now than it was then. That this technology wasn’t just a toy. Instead its arrival is an inflection point in human history. Over coming years and decades, AI will transform every aspect of our lives.

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