TOM LEONARD has an audience with the astonishing AI machine even its creator, Elon Musk, is worried about.
- AI bot ChatGPT is able to write stories, poems and jokes in different styles
- A user asks the bot to deliver the text and moments later the task is completed
- People have asked the programme to write a haiku about Donald Trump
- Others have asked for a Tom and Jerry episode in the style of Jane Austin
The year is 2045. The world is in a state of economic collapse due to the rise of automation, leaving millions of people unemployed and desperate.
‘Enter the tech billionaire, Dr Milton Ross. He has developed a revolutionary new type of artificial intelligence that promises to revolutionize the world. His AI, which he calls Neo, is capable of replacing humans in virtually any job.
‘Ross begins to roll out Neo to large corporations, who eagerly accept it. As the world begins to embrace Neo, the implications of its use become apparent. People are being replaced by machines and jobs are becoming scarce…’
Such a dystopian nightmare is a popular trope among sci-fi writers. The difference with this particular story, however, is that it was written for the Mail by a new, pioneering AI bot called ChatGPT, which in recent days has caused a frenzy in the technology world and beyond.
ChatGPT is a powerful computer program designed to stimulate conversation with humans — and it is now temporarily freely available for anyone to try out online.
I asked it to ‘write a plot for a movie about computers that replace people’. Within a couple of seconds, it produced the story about Dr Ross and Neo. And — this is important — if I typed the same instruction a second time, it would come up with a different, sometimes radically different, answer.
By Tom Leonard
