Today’s Back Page is brought to you by the future.
The Back Page yearns for obsolescence the way a child yearns for icecream or a cadet journalist longs for a scoop.
So it has been a joy to follow the progress of artificial intelligence programs whose job is to write well enough to eventually steal ours from us.
Never mind the radiologists: take the journalists first, I say.
These programs started humbly enough, able to crank out passable sport match reports. But when they came for the sports writers, the feature writers said nothing for they believed themselves to be uniquely irreplaceable.
According to this story in The Washington Post – in which the writer gets a language generator to spoof legendary feature writer Gay Talese with not-terrible results – this kind of AI has been through a step change in the past couple of years to the point where it is MUCH harder to spot the automation at work.
Sudowrite, online software that generates copy for you based on what you’ve written to date, uses GPT-3, the third generation of OpenAI’s writerbot. The idea of Sudowrite is to defeat writer’s block.
But your BP correspondent – who, for one, as we think we’ve already said, welcomes our new automated overlords! – spotted an opportunity to have her weekly contribution written for her.
We fed the first few paragraphs of this story into Sudowrite, clicked the copy-generating button, sat back and waited for the autojournalism magic to happen.
The practice is reminiscent of the days before the advent of the word processor, when people would type their first draft, go for a walk or a drink, and then come back to it to tidy up.
It is surely only a matter of time before someone writes a program to write a program to write a… well, you know the rest.
But if this is the beginning of the end for journalism as a profession, The Back Page would say it has been a fine run.
… Well, that’s creepy! Seamless, almost.
Indeed, one of the greatest things about this industry is that it has been a free-for-all from the start.
There is no qualification to enter. If you can write, you can write. If you can’t, you can’t.
… Hang on, I didn’t even press the button that time.
In a world where computers now beat us at our own games – chess, checkers, poker, the ancient Chinese game of Go – it is reassuring to know that a skill humans have long cherished remains safe from automation.
… OK, wait a minute. I feel like I’m being trolled here. You can’t do my job! You’re not even making jokes.
Of course, the same programmer who wrote this said that he didn’t believe that machines would be able to create music for about another 50 years.
A few years later, machines were able to compose music better than humans. And there are now machines that can take an existing piece of music and create variations on it, which are good enough to fool listeners.
You didn’t think that was possible, did you?
… All right, you’ve made your point. As I was saying …
Robots are already working in law firms, doing things like drafting contracts. There are start-ups specialising in using AI to do things like analyse the contracts that they’ve written, to check that they’re legally watertight.
There’s no doubt that AI is going to replace people in professions such as law and medicine. It’s not just about doing the work, but about understanding it.
As the machines get smarter, they’ll be able to do both.
We should add that we don’t really think the lawyers and doctors should worry too much. The same way we don’t worry about losing our jobs to a machine. If it happens, it happens. We’ll find something else to do.
… OK, that’s enough. Go and find yourself an MRI to read.
Speaking of doctors, when was the last time you visited one?
… I beg your pardon?
This article in The Guardian suggests that people are shunning GP appointments in favour of their mobile phones. Why go to see a doctor when you can Skype them?
… Don’t make me pull the plug on you, because I will.
So, as we head towards the robot, we would say it has been a fun ride.
But then, as the poet said: “Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not, time takes it all.”
If you feel in imminent danger of being supplanted by some code, 00111010101 0101010 in 101010 help 1010 110 to felicity@medicalrepublic.com.au
