ChatGPT and the metaverse are supposed to change the world. I'm not convinced.

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

ChatGPT and the metaverse are supposed to change the world. I'm not convinced.

Some of DALL·E mini’s less horrifying efforts when prompted to produce an image of “a female journalist with bobbed hair seen from behind working on a laptop, painted in the style of Vermeer.” The real DALL·E would do better, but its servers are overloaded and have been all day.

The first time I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, c. 2003, I was struck by a brief mention of the “versificator,” a machine that composed songs “without any human intervention.” The results were “dreadful rubbish,” but the proles sang them anyway.

I remember thinking this was ridiculous, and that whatever else might spring from the dystopia’s pages into real life, the versificator would never exist. The tech seemed improbable, and no one would want words strung together by a machine.

Well, the versificator is here, and it’s called ChatGPT. “You’ve hopefully heard about the AI tool that generates text in response to prompts,” writes

Joel Mathis

, my former colleague from The Week, in a Substack post entitled “I am in denial about ChatGPT.” He continues:

I certainly have. But I have also avoided reading or listening to too much about it. ‘ChatGPT’ is actually a muted term on my Twitter account, thanks to the obsessive posts by many other journalists—some of them playing with the tool as a toy of sorts to see what sort of clever thing they do, others publicly worrying about what it means for the future of our profession.

It just kind of fills me with dread. Am I going to be replaced by a robot? I hope not! But also: Possibly!

Perhaps I, too, am in denial about ChatGPT. Obviously I no longer find the tech implausible. But I’m skeptical of forecasts about the versificator’s integration into our daily lives, much as I’m skeptical of the hype around augmented and virtual reality projects like Meta’s (Facebook’s) metaverse, which also uses AI. So far, “dreadful rubbish” still seems apt.

I don’t have anything like a comprehensive theory behind my skepticism, and it’s wholly possible I’m rendering judgment too ignorantly and/or too soon. But here’s a baker’s dozen of disjointed thoughts and gleanings from recent coverage: