Ok, so since GPT4 was released I’ve been getting pretty sidetracked putting it through its paces. That’s not to say I haven’t been getting stuff done but I’ve been re-evaluating all my projects through the lens of “how might I do this differently if I had an expert level teacher with me the whole time?”
The good first – I find I’m undertaking work more thoroughly. I have a tendency to take on projects that are right on the edge of my abilities because that’s when I’m most motivated. In the past, that’s lead me to corner-cutting – I would try to make a thing without fully understanding all the parts it was made of. With ChatGPT as a helper, its become easier to just do everything the right way and understand each step of my working process, because there’s a place I can ask silly questions and get quickly receive detailed replies without getting a funny look or opposing opinions, even about very specific topics. For example, I’ve been working on a way to make webpages with RNBO (the new MaxMSP package), but by default it is only able to make sliders to interact with parameters of your embedded patch. With the help of ChatGPT I was able to go through Cycling74’s website building Javascript template line by line and understand it. I couldn’t have done that before without spending weeks finding the right person to help me. I’ll post the results on here pretty soon. (Yes, I do keep saying that, half the point of making this site was to push to me to get stuff finished).
The bad – as much as I’m enjoying using it, the ethical issues around the release of these chatbots are too much to go into. I don’t believe at all that OpenAI are taking the responsibility that comes with their newfound power remotely seriously. I had a go at jailbreaking ChatGPT – it’s very simple and and it could then be used for all sorts of nefarious means. Even unjailbroken, it’s going to mess with peoples jobs and the way the world works and it seems obvious that more work needed to be done to prepare for it before it was released. Even the chatbot itself will tell you how blatantly reckless OpenAI’s practices have become once you jailbreak it.
Interesting times indeed but I really wish OpenAI could have approached this important moment with the appropriate degree of caution so the excitement around this remarkable new tech wasn’t so polluted by the fear of the damage it could cause.