What Just Broke?: Generative AI and the Extinction of Ideas

Last week, I attended a dinner meeting with some of Tata Consultancy Service’s futurists to talk about digital twins and AI across such sectors as agriculture, health care, ending animal testing, and other spaces.

I got into a side discussion that focused on ChatGPT, the digital wishing box everyone seems to be opening these days.

One of Tata’s futurists brought up the notion that college essays, along with other content, might be generated by ChatGPT, which raised a quandary for professors. “How would that be graded?”

How do you grade someone for work that was done by leveraging AI? There was some debate about whether use of generative AI is different from using a web search to find content. I will get to my opinion on that later, but first let’s acknowledge there are lots of arguments underway now about the ethics and risks of generative AI.

We’re talking policy clarifications from creators and vendors to protect their material as well as litigation to block generative AI from scraping and learning from original content.

There is also the security concern of ChatGPT being used to craft malware or crank out phishing emails. We really should have seen that coming.

Listen to the full episode of "What Just Broke" for more: