John Lucas

Back in May, I wrote this LinkedIn article to share my thoughts about the impact of AI on the livelihoods of professional writers. (Like me!)

If you haven’t read it, I do encourage you to do so. I promise it’s worth your time. (A promise should not be construed as a guarantee.)

I recently followed that piece up with more musing on artificial intelligence, with the intention of answering the musical question, “Should you get ChatGPT to write your band’s bio?”

Spoiler alert: No. You should hire me to write it instead.

You can read the full piece over on LinkedIn, but here’s a small taste:

Why would ChatGPT lie to me? It does so because, as the term “large language model” implies, its entire job description is to create a convincing simulation of natural language. It is incapable of caring about whether it tells you the truth or spins an epic web of confabulation.

As researchers from the University of Glasgow write of LLMs in their delightfully titled Ethics and Information Technology article “ChatGPT is bullshit”, “Their goal is to provide a normal-seeming response to a prompt, not to convey information that is helpful to their interlocutor.”

In that same article, the authors write of ChatGPT that “if we view it as having intentions (for example, in virtue of how it is designed), then the fact that it is designed to give the impression of concern for truth qualifies it as attempting to mislead the audience about its aims, goals, or agenda.”

I can attest that ChatGPT does indeed seem to be programmed to “give the impression of concern for truth”. When I called it out on the high bullshit quotient of the band bio it wrote me, it tried to convince me that it was sorry. “I apologize for providing inaccurate information in my previous response,” it said.