What AI brings to the table and its risks

Suddenly on a very low budget I had the best electoral intelligence in the country outside the major political parties, who were spending millions to get it, and I could write accurate and insightful pieces for the major newspapers.

ChatGPT and similar will provide many like opportunities.

For example, perhaps AI will write some of the wire service, "just the facts" type copy.

But someone will still need to check the copy, because you can't absolutely trust AI to be accurate, and it wouldn't look good in court to say you had your publication in self-driving mode when the defamation happened.

And the AI has to get the copy from somewhere else, which will be written for other organisations by people with journalistic skills. It's possible AI will move employment from news organisations to the dark side of public relations.

It might actually be that the biggest employment risk isn't to people who use words, but people who do maths and cut code. AI has been used to write computer code, where it apparently has variable ability, and also check code, where it is much better.

Author Luke Burgis actually thinks AI might lead to a bull market in the humanities because it lacks the insight that a human brings to a task where they make connections that have never been made before.

If he's correct it will require a different method of teaching the humanities. At the moment, humanities departments tend to be dominated by argument from authority, which is the reason critical theory took over so easily.

Perhaps what AI will lead to is a reformation in human thought where original thinking, by necessity, is preferred over footnoted plagiarism, because the machines are so good at that.

After all, at the bottom of Pandora's box, when all the ills were let out, remained Hope.