Reconsidering the chatbot that changed everything

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. (Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.)

One year ago, ChatGPT was released into the world. The startlingly human-sounding chatbot kicked off the generative-AI revolution and quickly became one of the most successful internet applications ever—invading classrooms, workplaces, online stores, and more. The program has created billions of dollars of value where none existed before and enabled entire new skills and fields of work around coaxing useful responses from chatbots.

But perhaps more important than any direct, material change, ChatGPT has sparked our imaginations, feeding many people’s hopes and fears about the rise of intelligent machines: boundless productivity, boundless information, boundless misinformation. “ChatGPT, the tool, is likely less important than ChatGPT, the cultural object,” Charlie Warzel wrote in a new piece for The Atlantic. OpenAI’s premier chatbot is bending how entire industries, government bodies, financial institutions, and media publications think about the future. For the past year, our brains have been trapped in ChatGPT’s world.

The technology is less important than the ideas it represents.
By Charlie Warzel

ChatGPT has accomplished a lot in its first trip around the sun. The chatbot has upended or outright killed high-school and college essay writing and thoroughly scrambled the brains of academics, creating an on-campus arms race that professors have already lost. It has been used to write books, article summaries, and political content, and it has flooded online marketplaces with computer-generated slop.

As we’ve gotten to know ChatGPT, we’ve noticed how malleable it is. The li’l bot loves clichés. Its underlying technology has been integrated into internet search. ChatGPT is a time waster—a toy—but also, potentially, a labor-force destroyer and a way for machines to leech the remaining humanity out of our jobs. It may even be the harbinger of an unrecognizable world and a “textpocalypse” to come.

Read the full article here.

ChatGPT might not need to upend the entire world to make some kind of meaningful difference in your life. Below, some of our favorite Atlantic stories about the quieter AI revolution:

ChatGPT will change housework: People who have started using ChatGPT for their personal to-do lists have found it incredibly useful, Kate Cray writes.

You should ask a chatbot to make you a drink: AI is great at coming up with cocktail recipes, even as it fails at other tasks, Caroline Mimbs Nyce writes.

A chatbot is secretly doing my job: For plenty of people, having a robot help them produce serviceable copy will be exactly enough to allow them to get by in the world, Ryan Bradley writes.

Trying to decipher why Spotify Wrapped likened your personality to a pumpkin-spice latte? You’re not alone. Frustration with what, exactly, an algorithm reveals about you is the zeitgeist of the modern internet, Nancy Walecki writes.

— Matteo