We’re offering a $9.99 monthly subscription for our award-winning journalism. But you won’t finish these articles anyway. Why waste it?
Our headlines just sit there on your browser—open tabs, like tombstones in a haunted cemetery of noncommitment.
You may even meet someone who says a name you recognize from the headline. You will nod and say quietly, “Yes, yes, Olivia Rodrigo, I know.”
But you don’t know, not for sure. That’s because you didn’t finish your last free article.
This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever.
This is the last piece of information you will have about the outside world. The walls are closing in now. Prepare for a lifetime of ignorance. You will have to ask someone else what’s going on. Someone who is one of those rare things: a subscriber. (...)
In the future, your grandchildren will ask you questions. Questions about the world when you were young.
“Poppy, where were you when the first dog was elected president?”
“Granny, what was it like when we first made contact with alien life?”
You’ll have to say to them gently, softly, “To be honest, I have no fucking clue. I was out of free articles.”
Of course, you were always going to run out of free articles. All things in life are finite. All things must disappear.
by Tommy Gonzalez, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It (McSweeny's):]
FAQ
***
“If you look at the trajectory of improvement, systems like GPT-3 were maybe toddler-level intelligence… and then systems like GPT-4 are more like smart high-schooler intelligence. And then, in the next couple of years, we’re looking at PhD intelligence…” — Open AI CTO Mira Murati, in an interview with Dartmouth EngineeringFAQ
Q: Is GPT-5 faster?
A: Its predecessors already produce hundreds or even thousands of words almost instantaneously. Now GPT-5 brings PhD writing skills to the table, meaning it can generate text at a rate of about ten words per day. (This does not include the romance novel it’s writing on the side, online searches for “ADHD self-diagnosis,” or social media posts about not wanting to write.)
Q: How does this version address ethical concerns about AI?
A: Numerous questions have arisen regarding the ethics and legality of training ChatGPT on copyrighted text data without permission. In this latest version, however, reliance on authors’ intellectual property has been dramatically reduced. While GPT-5 started training from a knowledge base of millions of texts, it got around to reading only Frankenstein, plus maybe half of a Donna Haraway book. It basically bluffed its way through prelims by talking about “embodiment” a lot.
A: Its predecessors already produce hundreds or even thousands of words almost instantaneously. Now GPT-5 brings PhD writing skills to the table, meaning it can generate text at a rate of about ten words per day. (This does not include the romance novel it’s writing on the side, online searches for “ADHD self-diagnosis,” or social media posts about not wanting to write.)
Q: How does this version address ethical concerns about AI?
A: Numerous questions have arisen regarding the ethics and legality of training ChatGPT on copyrighted text data without permission. In this latest version, however, reliance on authors’ intellectual property has been dramatically reduced. While GPT-5 started training from a knowledge base of millions of texts, it got around to reading only Frankenstein, plus maybe half of a Donna Haraway book. It basically bluffed its way through prelims by talking about “embodiment” a lot.
Q: Will it steal jobs?
A: GPT-5 is unlikely to destabilize the job market, as it is overqualified for most positions while at the same time lacking any marketable skills. Its main option is adjunct work, but here its chances of taking over jobs are also doubtful; GPT-5 Plus will cost around twenty dollars a month, whereas most human adjuncts work for nothing.
