12 Uses For The New AI Program That Fans Claim Will Change The World Forever

12 Uses For The New AI Program That Fans Claim Will Change The World Forever

Amid dozens of controversies about AI technology stealing art and denying the Holocaust, it can be difficult to think of its genuinely cool capabilities — especially when Midjourney is constantly failing to even generate the right number of fingers on a human hand. GPT-4 is the latest version of AI text generators that responds to human input, and its developers have promised even better performance.

But do their claims actually hold water? Well, people are creating new, more advanced projects with the technology, from suing robocallers to creating playable video games. All of this is done at extremely rudimentary levels, but it hasn’t stopped AI’s most eager proponents from fawning breathlessly at the technology.

We’ll probably find out about all of the moral quandaries of the new technology in a few weeks, but in the meantime, you can make your own call on whether or not GPT-4 is living up to its promises.

‘One-click lawsuits’ for robocallers

Screenshot: Open AI / Joshua Browder
Screenshot: Open AI / Joshua Browder

DoNotPay is a self-described “robot lawyer” that provides services like overturning parking tickets, challenging bank fees, and suing robocallers. It’s now using GPT-4 for creating legal forms, which the CEO says wasn’t possible with the previous version of the AI software.

Copy and pasting forms probably works too, but it doesn’t have that AI sheen.

Create prescription medication

Screenshot: Open AI / Ryan Shea
Screenshot: Open AI / Ryan Shea

A bunch of tech executives are claiming that GPT-4 can take an available medicine and find substitutes, modify the medicine to create non-patented variants, and purchase the prescriptions from a supplier. All without a trained and licensed pharmacist.

Please don’t do this. Please don’t put your health outcomes in the hands of a computer program that isn’t capable of correcting itself or feeling empathy for your symptoms. There is a reason why pharmacy schools exist and why medicines are heavily regulated: Because it’s incredibly easy to fuck it up, and fucking it up has potentially horrifying consequences. Your body is a temple, not a testing site for whatever chemical compounds an AI spits out at you.

Matchmake on dating websites

Screenshot: Open AI / Jake Kozloski
Screenshot: Open AI / Jake Kozloski

The CEO of an AI matchmaking service has fed his dating profile preferences into GPT-4 and asked it to determine whether or not a match is “worth pursuing” and automates the follow-up. The program also takes racial preferences into account, in case you wanted to efficiently automate systemic bigotry.

Look, I really hope that you’re not going to GPT your responses to a potential life partner. But the point is, you could if you really wanted to. AI’s attempts to emulate human emotions already seem to work pretty well on people like this incredibly gullible New York Times reporter.

Turning drawings into websites

Screenshot: Open AI / YouTube
Screenshot: Open AI / YouTube

This is an extremely simple GPT-4-made website created from a hand-drawn mock-up that I could have made after a month of self-teaching myself HTML and CSS, so I really don’t think GPT-4 is going to put thousands of web developers out of work any time soon. But if you just needed to figure out how to make some text boxes for your Tumblr blog, then GPT could be a quick fix.

Pong

Screenshot: Open AI / Pietro Schirano
Screenshot: Open AI / Pietro Schirano

With its powerful processing capabilities, GPT-4 has now unlocked the ability to program a game that’s over 50 years old. You could learn how to make it by attending a coding boot camp, but why bother! It’s so much more satisfying to pull up the code in an AI generator rather than going through the tiresome motions of actually learning why things work a certain way.

Snake

Screenshot: Open AI / Ammaar Reshi
Screenshot: Open AI / Ammaar Reshi

Oh, now here’s a modern video game. The original Snake was released on Nokia phones in 1997, though iterations stretch back to the 1970s. You can now generate it with GPT-4.

Connect Four

Screenshot: Fire Keeper
Screenshot: Fire Keeper

Another aspiring game developer made Connect Four in GPT-4. “It’s going to be an incredible next generation of media,” the GPT prompter said about an actively patented game created in 1974.

Tetris

Screenshot: Open AI / Javi Lopez
Screenshot: Open AI / Javi Lopez

I’m starting to wonder if GPT-4 is capable of creating any wholly original games. Or any pre-existing game made after the year 2000. This AI generated Tetris needs an original kick. Maybe some extra fingers might help?

Create-your-own-adventure style games

Screenshot: Open AI / Steve Mora
Screenshot: Open AI / Steve Mora

GPT-4 created a ruleset for a choose-your-own adventure game, but it isn’t actually playable. The program even admits to not being able to interpret and execute the rules. Rather than fessing up to the limits of the technology, the prompter tries to obfuscate what happened by claiming, “It told me that it didn’t want to play.” That’s not what his own screenshot says, though!

Pass college-level exams

Screenshot: Open AI / Kotaku
Screenshot: Open AI / Kotaku

The developers of GPT-4 claimed that the program can exhibit “human-level performance” on certain exams. While the chart of various academic test scores seems impressive at first, the software failed both AP English exams with a 2 out of 5. It scored extremely well on tests where all that a computer program needed was the right information, which isn’t very impressive to anyone who has used Google in the past few decades.

Again, I don’t think that we’re suddenly going to be bleeding lawyers. As someone who has actually performed reasonably well on the LSAT, I can also tell you that taking the test and practising law are very different things. Law exams are about pattern recognition, which is exactly what AI is built to do. AP exams work similarly, and you can answer a large bulk of questions by word association.

I’m actually glad that GPT-4 can score well on the more rote tests that only measure how long you’ve spent drilling flashcards. I’ve never believed in exams that require students to memorise tons of information. Its failure to pass English exams is proof that critical thinking is the most important skill that you can get out of education.

Generate ‘music’

Screenshot: Proletariat Brain
Screenshot: Proletariat Brain

It may not be a masterpiece, but you could theoretically generate some sounds with GPT-4 that AI evangelists have mistaken for “music.”

Explain jokes

Screenshot: Nwelch
Screenshot: Nwelch

GPT-4 can now replicate the most annoying person at any party: The guy who explains all his own jokes. Knowledge is being able to piece together why a world map of chicken tenders is inherently funny. Wisdom is not saying the reason aloud.


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