For those of us born before about the year 2000, our memories worked differently. We knew phone numbers off by heart. Facts. Dates. The best way to get from Manor House to Marble Arch. The viewing schedule for Neighbours. Then along came Google and smartphones and suddenly all the information you ever needed was in your pocket. I’m not saying we became giant walking scaleless goldfish, but scientists generally agree that our memories changed. Fast forward a couple of decades from now, and we will probably look back at 2023 as a similar turning point in the human brain, but this time for creativity.
In November, OpenAI released on an unsuspecting world ChatGPT, an artificially intelligent chatbot that can do everything from write a (dubious) song lyric in the style of Nick Cave to pass an MBA exam to pontificate about the nature of consciousness. Type in a request and up pops a response before you’ve had time to put the kettle on It has since become the fastest growing web platform in history, with an update called GPT-4 adding to its eerie power in March 2023.
