The Dawn of Mediocre Computing - by Venkatesh Rao

Well, we all knew it was coming. Computers already easily overwhelm the best humans at chess and Go. Now they have done something far harder: achieved parity with David Brooks at writing. OpenAI's ChatGPT, released as a research beta two days ago, has done to the standard high-school essay what cameras did to photorealistic painting and pocket calculators did to basic arithmetic. It is open sign-up and free for now, but I suspect not for much longer, so go try it; and make sure to trawl social media for interesting and revealing examples being posted by people. As an open-world, real-ish (I'll define real-ish in a minute) domain, the correct standard for judging an AI on writing is not beating the "best" humans1 in a stylized closed-world competition (the existence of such competitions is a mark of a certain kind of simplicity), but achieving indistinguishability from mediocre humans. And when it comes to writing, nobody does mediocre more mediocrely than David Brooks.