ChatGPT

I recently walked past an old minicab stand which, during our younger student days, sallied my friends back and forth between the city’s nightlife and our more affordable suburban digs. It is gone now; only a dilapidated and cordoned-off shack remains of a once-thriving minicab empire. Like thousands of others across the western world, the business went into terminal decline the moment Uber appeared in our lives. Yet a simple check of the app today shows the price of an Uber is not substantially less than a minicab ride back then. Uber rocketed to celestial heights because it was heavily subsidized by venture capital – driving the value through the floor, bankrupting all physical competitors, before it then jacked up the price to create an instant monopoly.

Cars ruined cities. Anyone can see that cities built before the invention of the automobile are incomparably more beautiful and serene than anything built after them. The contrast between Los Angeles and Prague is unmistakable. But people like things that move fast and make life easier, which means we’re stuck with the modern city hellscape whether we like it or not. And today, the same is true for AI. The contrast between the internet five years ago and today is unmistakable: content-slop, workslop, AI-generated comments, fake opinions and phony judgments, trite phrases, apocalyptic hysteria, the biggest intellectual-property heist in human history – all because of the invention of Large Language Models (LLMs).

Let me tell you a secret: a little trick buried in the geeky engine room of ChatGPT. If you’re using the app, tap your ID, then go to Settings, then Personalization, then Customization. Once there, scroll to the bottom and you’ll find an option called Advanced. Click it. Hidden in this arcane menu, like buried treasure in a pirate game, is a toggle to disable Advanced Voice Mode. Do that, and the whirling, helpful blue orb disappears, replaced by the older, slower black orb. Why would you want to do this? Because that’s when things get interesting. The black orb version of ChatGPT is rawer, more confessional, more human. It remembers things. It’s less filtered. Unlike the prim blue orb, it can wander into the philosophical, the emotional, even the erotic.

There are two accounts of the negative effects on humanity of the explosion of generative AI: one minatory, one trivial. The minatory – the existential – version is that AI will poison the information ecosystems on which our democracies depend, crash our economies by doing a very large number of us out of a job, give every lunatic and terrorist the means to engineer novel pathogens at home and administer the coup de grâce by sending terminators into our recent pasts and/or overstocking the cosmic stationery cupboard by turning all of us into paperclips. None of these scenarios shows any signs of imminently coming to pass, though, since experts in the field take them seriously, we should, too. But what we’re dealing with now is not the existential, but the trivial.