Let’s not say “magic” when we mean “technology” or “work”
John Wiswell’s Nebula-nominated short story DIY popped into my head yesterday when I heard a tech entrepreneur refer, somewhat off-handedly, to an aspect of the technology he is selling as “magic.”
In my experience, in Silicon-Valley-speak, “magic” means “proprietary” or “I don’t wanna explain”– the “magic” is usually an aspect of technology that brings in the money; the stuff where you’d have to sign an NDA before someone will explain it to you in detail. Secret, money-making stuff.
Outside of fiction, it doesn’t sit right with me, calling what’s plainly technology “magic”. “Magic” implies exclusivity, special access privileges, maybe even some genetic or otherwise privileged predisposition – you have to be a witch, wizard, magician (or enter an exclusive training program to become one).
I don’t like coming across the word “magic” in the context of current developments in AI tools (specifically, let’s say, chatGPT).
It’s not “magic”. It’s technology. And it’s technology that, from what I hear, even its creators don’t fully understand, which should make anyone who’s into history or the history of science or science fiction go “whoa!”
It’s technology that affects everyone. So it shouldn’t be made to seem like exclusive, unattainable “magic” to anyone. As with any tool, it will affect different people differently. It will probably create more skilled users and less skilled users, exploiters and exploited, those who are able to make money off it and those lured into having to pay money for it.
It’s not “magic”. It’s technology. Tech people (“tech wizards”…?) probably saw it coming, but for non-tech people chatGPT was suddenly dropped on them from a position of “magical” privilege. It’s wrong to imply that it’s impossible for non-tech people to acquire knowledge of what goes into these machine learning models, the basics of how they work, and why they’re flawed.
In order to use chatGPT responsibly and effectively, critical thinking skills are required of the user; not “magic”, but work. Work is required: by teachers and by students. Understanding has to be widely accessible. At the very least understanding the difference between an internet search and a chatGPT response (a string of words placed into a sequence according to probability, successfully mimicking human language). With a tool of this potential impact, technology can’t be elusive “magic”.
