“What makes a man? A friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don’t think so. It’s the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.“
– Guillermo Del Toro
Who we are as a people is defined not by the things we can do but by those that we ought to. In recent months, the advent of ChatGPT has fueled fierce discussion – on the rise of artificial intelligence, its increasing role in our daily lives, and what it means for people. In this article, I explore the rise of ChatGPT, what this means for humanity, and how the retelling of a classic tale can provide renewed impetus for how we define our own personhood in the face of emerging technologies.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an advancing chatbot that utilises AI technology. This natural language processor allows you to have human-like conversations, compose essays, develop proposals and create various other text-based output. ChatGPT has very quickly found a growing variety of uses, from students tasking it with writing papers to playing a game of tic-tac-toe and even to write music and computer code. More recent versions are able to surf the internet on the users’ behalf and base its text output on this. The bot has been wildly successful, with a reported 100 million users within two months of its launch. According to an analysis by Swiss bank UBS, ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app of all time.
Its popularity is not it’s only impressive feature. Its computational abilities are what have captured the public’s attention, with the present iteration of ChatGPT writing at a standard beyond average human competence (for instance, it has passed the bar exam with an 80% score). Through further development, the chat bot can/will potentially eclipse our writing ability altogether. In fact, Elon Musk and others have recently called for a moratorium on the development of similar Ai tech, to allow our governance mechanisms to place guardrails on this fast paced development.
While the potential of ChatGPT is no doubt astounding, it is not this article’s primary interest. I do not wish to add to the long list of eugoligies, mourning the careers that ChatGPT has already begun to replace. Just how far ChatGPT can be taken and how far it could/will be taken remains to be seen. It may play the role of calculator in the realm of math or replace the mathematician altogether.
My greater concern regarding the rise of ChatGPT and chatbots of a similar kin is the implication that we have with knowledge, and our responsibility over knowledge. The ability of machines to recall information has already exceeded ours and all of human knowledge fits neatly into even the most basic cell phone. Yet, our responsibility over this knowledge remains an important part of our humanity.
Let me explain. The tie between personhood and knowledge can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and even further, encapsulated in Immanuel Kant’s rallying cry sapere aude, dare to know. A commitment to the duty of humans to think for themselves.
In grappling with how to deal with ChatGPT and determine its place in our changing world, wisdom can be found in Guillermo Del Toro’s recent retelling of Pinocchio. When watching the remake of the classic tale, I was expecting a traditional story tailored to a modern audience. Instead, I was met with a carefully crafted and heart-wrenching tale of grief and hope typical of Del Toro’s work.
Like with the rise of ChatGPT, Pinocchio grapples with what it means to be human when met with a being that falls within our definitions and breaks them. The moral core of Del Toro’s film is an answer to the question: what makes a real boy? Unlike his predecessors, Guillermo Del Toro does not frame his answer in relation to the material of Pinnoccio’s body but instead around the substance of his character. Summarily put: ‘A boy who won’t be good might just as well be made of wood.’
This determination that our humanity be grounded in our ethics as opposed to our ontology provides a lesson in how we should view and treat ChatGPT and other emerging technologies. As the chatbot and many others like it (like generative Ai), continue to learn, improve and challenge our roles and centrality in different facets of life, we must accept that our ability to write, create and collect information may be eclipsed, but our duty to teach, edit and be a source of truth must persists. We must continue to play the role of Geppetto in instilling lessons of right and wrong; and of Del Toro in daring to create with care, even as our creations confound and confuse.
The way I see it, while this threatens the role and centrality of humans in some key ways, it simultaneously calls for a greater centering of our sense of responsibility, demanding that we remain in the loop, and provide moral pastures and ethical modelling for the development and implementation of these systems. What will carry the day, as I suggest, is what we decide as our continued role in the advancement of Ai. Ultimately, we carry the responsibility of deciding the nature of ai systems – through our data, our role and the uses we give to Ai systems. We, humans, decide the nature of ChatGPT.
Kyle Cloete & Keketso Kgomosotho are Co-Founders of TECHila Law, a consulting firm working at the intersection of ethics, human rights and emerging technology.
