The biggest optimists seem to be on LinkedIn (where else?), where people breathlessly share use-cases everyday.

Mostly, I agree. This technology is revolutionary, and a lot of things will never be the same again.

But we’ve also been told other things. Like how as AI gets better and better, it’ll be able to do more things, like write great stories and screenplays. Or poetry. Or even music. And we’re told that this will be so mesmerising, beautiful, and human-like. There’s some evidence for this already. Even now, ChatGPT can create content in the style of your favourite painter, writer, or artist. As computational power accelerates and grows, it’ll only get better and better.

But… not really. This is not going to happen. 

The central question around ChatGPT is essentially:

What happens when AI-powered content becomes so good that it can fool humans?

For a month now, most of the conversation around ChatGPT has been focused on the AI-powered content part. Breathless LinkedIn posts aside, there have been long Twitter threads about the ethics around it and lots of strategy presentations at company offsites about what happens when the cost of content creation becomes zero. These are legitimate things to talk about, and some of it is interesting. 

But if you ask me, the far more interesting aspect—the one that’s less discussed—is not about technology, but about the last part of that question, i.e., humans. 

The technology is going to get better and better, and it’s going to find more and more use-cases. This is inevitable. But if we really want to understand how AI-powered content that mimics humans is going to change the world as we know it, the answer lies less with understanding the technology and more with understanding humans. 

Let’s dive in.

At the time, I asked, “how long before it can write the next 200 words?”

Today, I have the answer. 

Never. 

Humans have been obsessed with the question of whether machines can match human intelligence for centuries now. However, in 1950, one person finally came up with a way to measure it. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s called the Turing Test. Essentially, humans are asked to determine if they are chatting with a human or a machine simply by asking questions to them via a text box, and by observing the responses. Of course, the Turing Test isn’t meant to be a precise, objective definition of intelligence. But it’s a useful heuristic, and in the context of ChatGPT, which attempts to create human-like content, it’s even more relevant.  

ChatGPT is extremely powerful, but as many have pointed out (including its creators), it’s not “intelligent” in the way we understand the word. It’s generative AI, which basically makes it excellent at pattern matching, and regurgitation of human content that’s been created in the past. It makes basic errors and is often factually wrong, but we tend to overlook all of that because occasionally, it feels human. Just a little bit. And we fall for it.

But we are far, far more gullible with text. 

Text is one of the earliest forms of communication, and for all of us, we automatically assume it’s always created by humans, especially if it’s in a conversational context in chats. We also associate intelligence with its quality. If something is polished, well-written with the right spelling and grammar, we believe that the writer is intelligent—completely ignoring the fact that tools like Grammarly and spellcheck have assisted the writer significantly.  

However, there’s still one step left before machines like ChatGPT can really fool humans. 

They first need to fool other machines. 

And ChatGPT is doing this very well. It’s already being used to create content that fools search engines into believing that it’s relevant and useful for humans. Today, there are millions of companies across the world offering content writing services—essentially farms to churn out content for products sold on e-commerce sites, or on media properties, or SaaS website blogs. All for exactly one purpose: to show up at the top of Google search as a relevant result. 

And now, well, ChatGPT is changing all that. Take the example of CNET, which is going through a fairly public controversy around the use of AI in publishing:

But which humans?

Well, obviously the not-so-smart ones. 

This is an uncomfortable distinction and it probably sounds elitist, but it’s relevant. There’s a tight 1-1 relationship between the quality of content and its consumers. Just take a look at the bestseller section at any bookstore and you’ll know what I mean. It’s also why scam emails and SMSes are deliberately filled with typos and grammatical errors—it’s all done to select the audience who can’t see the mistakes and flaws, because they are the ones who are the most gullible, and er… dumb. 

ChatGPT just takes this further. It creates content that sounds insightful and relevant for an audience a couple of levels above those who think emails from Nigerian princes are insightful and relevant. 

By this, of course, I mean the LinkedIn crowd. 

Here’s an example I created, using ChatGPT.

To be fair, sometimes, it’s not about whether the people are smart or dumb, but the context in which the information is presented. If I published this in a newspaper, most people would wonder why it was so shallow. 

Eugene Goostman was a chatbot which some consider to have passed the Turing test successfully in 2012. It managed to convince a third of the human judges that they were chatting with a human and not a machine. It was portrayed as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy—which led humans to overlook its many obvious grammatical errors and poor general knowledge, fooling them to believe that it was a human. 

ChatGPT will get better and better. It will create great LinkedIn posts. It’ll create college essays that will fool admission officers. And over time, more and more people will occasionally believe that content created by it is created by humans and attribute authenticity to it. How long before it’s used to create WhatsApp forwards that sound convincing but are actually nonsense?

Back in 1986, the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a famous paper called, ‘On Bullshit’, where he examines bullshit speech in detail. The essence is, to quote the Wikipedia summary, that “Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but cares only whether the listener is persuaded”. 

ChatGPT is going to get better and better at bullshit. 

But only to a point. 

The top echelons of creators and discerning consumers won’t ever be affected. In fact, they may thrive. I think these creators will wall off their content (this has already started) from ChatGPT and AI. Soon, content and media companies will proudly claim every single word written on their websites are “AI-free”, or “handcrafted”. When the market is flooded by a mass-market commodity, the artisanal products will talk about their distinctiveness more and try to stand out. Why should content be any different?

I’ll end with a final story. 

It’s something called the one word Turing Test. 

Here’s the details.

They ran this test with hundreds of participants, and this is what the results looked like.

This time, they asked participants to choose between pairs of words, and asked them to decide which of the two words they thought was given by a human.

The winning answer?

Well…