Search Here ….

Tags

Academic integrity AI AI Detectors Artificial Intelligence Asia School of Business ChatGPT ChatGPT Malaysia ChatGPT Plus Education Entrepreneurs and Startups Malaysia Entrepreneurship Gardens Google GPTZero IGCSE Malaysia Malls Maps72 Microsoft Midjourney MIT MrMoney TV OpenAI Pavilion Plagiarism Plagiarism checkers Poe Quora Sam Altman Software development Technology Turnitin Udemy Writing
Uncategorized

Apparently, I Now Sound Like An AI (And What It Means)

Victor TanPost a Comment

The other day, I used OpenAI’s new Whisper algorithm for the first time…

…Only to realize something very, very strange.

If you’ve not heard about Whisper, it’s OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, and it’s significantly more accurate compared to something like Siri, which I usually use, or other kinds of technologies.

Anyway, for an upcoming Medium piece, I chose to narrate everything into the voice memo app on my iPhone, in preparation to have it transcribed by Whisper, while I was on a drive from my home to my cello lesson about 15 minutes away.

Whisper did it *almost* perfectly!

Whisper did it (almost!) perfectly, by the way.

Then, I uploaded this into ChatGPT just to format it but didn’t change any of the text.

This was perfect! It was well transcribed, everything looked good, and all that remained was for me to just post the thing, right?

…No.

Because you see, at this point, I started to wonder about a strange question that was starting to brew in my mind:

Was this text AI generated or was it human generated?

I asked several people this question, and almost all of them, said the same thing – it was AI assisted, but the text itself was primarily generated by a human.

To me, that makes a lot of sense because I recited it from my voice, and it wouldn’t make sense if it were considered to be AI generated unless what’s inside my head is not in fact a human brain, but rather some sort of super computer.

So I decided to just check with GPTZero just to be sure.

Here’s what GPTZero had to say, as it casually marked the parts of the my essay that it thought were AI-generated in a bright yellow.

I was a little shook.

Essentially, the majority of the text was determined to have been generated by AI.

At first, I thought about a couple of different possibilities. I wonder to myself – was it because I had put the text through ChatGPT? Could it have been that the text had been watermarked or modified in some way that allowed GPTZero to determine that it had been generated by AI?

That didn’t seem to make sense, particularly since OpenAI has not yet implemented watermarks in text . Still, the text definitely wasn’t modified in any way apart from the paragraphing or anything else of that nature.

Therefore, what was the only logical possibility here?

The only possibility is that according to GPTZero, I sounded like an AI.

This made me think quite a fair bit and it just so happened that in the gym I ran into my friend Sandy Clarke, with whom I ended up discussing the matter, (Sandy is wonderful and incredibly humble relative to what he’s achieved – check him out here!) and who suggested that perhaps artificial intelligence speech is just speech of a formal nature and to consider the speeches of JFK and Obama, so I decided to go right ahead and input JFK’s inaugural speech into GPTZero:

…Then I went on to input Obama’s inaugural speech:

… So did this mean that John F Kennedy and Obama were both advanced forms of artificial intelligence sent to planet earth to rule over the most advanced societies in the world, over which no normal human could have presided?

It would be funny if that were true.

At this point, I started to realize that the way that I spoke was just similar to the way that these people speak, which was similar to what GPTZero was identifying as AI-generated.

That’s not all that surprising, since my job is to help students learn how to write effectively, to assist them with their grammar, and also with the way that they use the English language.

But it made me start to wonder – when we interact with artificial intelligence, it’s a new type of interaction where we’re essentially just conversing with and reading from a tool that we are constantly interacting with all the time. Is it all that surprising that that could lead to language change on our parts, and therefore a shift in the way that we think and communicate?

It’s not necessarily going to be the case that humans end up fusing with machine parts, as some movies seem to suggest that we will, but certainly there are going to be changes in our culture as a result of the way that we interact with technology that perhaps aren’t immediately apparent at the outset; what are those changes going to be? It’s not immediately clear what the answer to those questions are.

It was definitely funny to think about this, though, because it leads them into all sorts of interesting questions about sentience, and also about the people that we communicate with – what if the people around us end up adopting artificial intelligence language patterns to the point that we are unable to distinguish the language that is used by artificial intelligence from the language that is used by human beings?

That might be one of the ways in which we become more machinelike as a species, or perhaps not — either way, it was pretty interesting to watch this happen and to ask myself about the ways in which I am being influenced by AI, because we often think of humans and AI as being distinct and different from one another, and that there are clear boundary lines that separate us…

But how are those boundary lines changing over time? The answer to that question is unclear to me.

Yep.

As we interact with AI, I suppose that we will start to talk a little bit more like AI.

As we move forward in this world, I expect that AI detectors will not really be a meaningful way in which we detect human beings — that our natural instincts of judgment and distinction may become just a little bit finer as we go through life.

On my part, I find it kind of funny that maybe the people reading this piece might think rightfully that I am an AI — a sentient AI, maybe — but an AI for all intents and purposes.

To that I say… Who knows if that could happen to you too?

Victor Tan

Victor Tan is incredibly excited about AI technology and its potential to transform the world. He is the creator of Transform Your Creative Writing With ChatGPT on Udemy and the author of The Little Robot That Could Paint, an AI-generated children’s book that introduces children to artificial intelligence that will release on March 14th, 2023. He is deeply passionate about education, and In his coaching and tutoring business Ascendant Academy, he teaches students not only how to sell themselves to top institutions, how to write effectively and conceptualize ideas with AI, believing deeply that AI is not here to replace us, but instead to help us to level up as a species as we conceptualize and create the most powerful tools that the world has known since the dawn of humanity. When he isn’t spending time writing, creating online courses, and creating the occasional video about ergonomic chairs and curious uses of ChatGPT on his YouTube channel, he’s probably  spending time coaching students to enter top universities in the US and UK, creating new Apple Homekit smart home automations, and playing an already unreasonably large yet still growing collection of musical instruments.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

AUAM-NAMSA Corporate Pathways Networking Dinner – Some small reflections.

The journey has been pretty interesting in a whole bunch of different ways. Amongst other things, I’ve received a partnership with GerakBudaya, and also in conjunction with the American Universities Alumni Association of Malaysia and the National Assembly of Malaysian Students in the United States of America (NAMSA), we are organizing this event. Here’s the event PDF to showcase that this is quite real. Honestly, even the term Corporate Pathways is a bit of a misnomer. I don’t know how corporate this event is going to be, primarily because it’s mainly going to be focused upon experience sharing and how people thought about their lives in the course of GLC in relation to the education that they received while they were in the U.S. There is a whole backstory to this that goes back about a month or two months or so, but has led me to a place of networking, meeting different people, and establishing friendly chat after friendly chat, rather than transactional moment after transactional moment with a bunch of different people with whom I probably never imagined at the outset that I’d be on casual speaking terms with. Anyway, here are some of the people who will be on the panel. GLC Panel: Nick Khaw, Head of Research at Khazanah and alumnus of Harvard University. Aik Chong Phuah, previous CEO of Petronas Digital and alumnus of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Brendan Yap, Senior Executive at the Securities Commission and alumnus of NYU. Athirah Azmi, former Manager, Client Coverage at Maybank Investment Bank and alumna of the University of Chicago  Private Sector Panel: Audrey Ooi, co-founder of Colony Coworking Space and an alumna of Mount Holyoke College, also known as @fourfeetnine. Dato’ Vincent Choo, Founder, Urban Ground Group, Franchisee Subway; alumnus of Eastern Michigan University. Yen Ping Teh, APAC Product Partnerships at Google and an […]

The Most Moral Business?

From a very young age, I had always understood businesses as entities that bring value to society in meaningful ways that otherwise it would not receive – and that’s one of the many reasons why the bookstore had always stood out to me as one of the ultimate business forms; after all, what could deliver more value to society than the transmission of knowledge itself for the profit of mankind, far above and in excess the monetary value that is paid for them? There is a huge camp out there of people who think that knowledge should be free and fairly accessible – I don’t dispute this to be a valuable point of view, but I also consider it to not be tenable; sure, we can say that society is the core issue and that knowledge *should* all be made available to the universe, but the fact remains that creating and obtaining knowledge is a costly effort, and if nothing else, the process of assembling something together whether through study or physical organization is something that manifestly should be rewarded. A critic might very well say that that’s the capitalist in me speaking and fighting against all the tides of justice, but I believe that life is about managing circumstances, finding spaces in the interstices of ideals and reality where there is a happy balance, and pushing forward in the thrust for existence. In my ethical system and paradigm, that bookstore is the most moral of the businesses out there – maybe a little strange if you consider that Amazon had started out as an online bookstore perhaps, but that’s what we’re working with here x) Anyway, I’m very happy to announce that I have a brand new partnership with the online bookstore GerakBudaya, for whom I’ve begun writing reviews – most immediately, a review of Dr. Toh Kin Woon’s “Malaysia’s […]

Fighting Perfectionism

If there were a flaw that I would observe about myself, I think it would be this. That I am someone who thinks a little too much about what other people think. What this means sometimes is that I tend to not want to release things because I fear that they won’t be appreciated, people won’t like them, or anything else of that nature. And granted, that doesn’t happen across everything. If it’s just an Instagram story, for example, I just enjoy releasing dumb, interesting things that reflect the different random things that happen during the course of the day. But when it comes to more extended creative projects, I think that I am restrained in some ways by feeling that everything needs to be perfect. Everything needs to somehow just match up with the best. And in some ways, that is kind of negative, because if you were to just try for things that aren’t always good, if you’re a new perfectionist, then what ends up happening is that, sure, you might end up creating a good product, but what will probably happen also is that you’ll just not release anything. And believe me, that does happen quite a fair bit for me. I am the kind of person who tends to hem to haw, to just kind of let things go by because I think, “Oh, it’s not ready. Oh, I shouldn’t release this. Oh, more needs to be done.” And that’s just my nature. I tend to be pretty careful with a lot of different things. But at the same time, I’d like to try to get past that and I think that that can happen in at least two different ways. One is that I reach a level of ability whereby the things that I do end up matching what I consider to be a nice standard. […]

Time and Existential Risk

Time is the ultimate existential risk.  I know this not just from deferring to the vague idea of theory or of an arcane book somewhere. It’s something that I’ve experienced deeply and intimately from my own struggling with the realities of procrastination in a world that seems to tolerate it on the surface, but only because I wasn’t able to appreciate what that procrastination brought about, the end of many different things, on timescales that I did not appreciate and therefore could not apprehend.  Now the thing is, as a child, you maybe don’t appreciate that time is passing. Far from it. When you’re in the midst of school, it feels least like time is passing. In boring afternoon lectures, it can feel like the entire moment has lasted more than a lifetime plus some change. And still, the teacher is there yapping about something that you don’t really care too much about.  All of us understand in life that all things come to an end.  Human lifespans are finite, averaging 72.6 years according to the WHO in 2019, with exceptions like Japan at 84.5, Singapore at 83.9, and Monaco at 89.4. The average career is 40 years.  School concludes in no more than 6 years at elementary level, 5 years in secondary. It kinda depends what kind of schooling system you go for and where you were born, but that doesn’t really matter. From school, maybe you work, or if you’re lucky enough, you go on to university. Then poof, 4 years later, maybe you graduate, get a new degree, and so on so forth – but in the moment, it feels like you were engaging with a distant theoretical concept, and the temptation draws us in to believe a quixotic ideal: “This moment will last forever.” But it will not. Though you may feel that it will last forever, […]

Sleep In Progress

I lie in bed, my eyes are closed. My over-caffeinated heart is beating, “Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud” in the depths of a chest that will not rest. This is the fruit that has grown from the coffee after a joyous evening, reminding me that not all that is pleasant is desirable and not all that is enjoyable yields longer term joy. It doesn’t help that the sound of laughter repeats from outside my window, innocuous at best at 10am but odious at 1am – a one digit separation, but a universe apart. The judgmental part of me considers the inconsiderate neighbors and their inconsiderate family members just casually laughing away with no thought for anyone whom they may affect, and somehow in a flash, it dawns upon me: This is the nature of true evil. Evil, in all likelihood, is not callous nor is it particularly malicious. It’s just the result of doing what feels right at a particular time, feeling that one is justified, with no deeper meaning underpinning it. I don’t suppose that my neighbors have a particular wish for me to experience sleep deprivation. No, rather they wish merely to enjoy their weekend. Does it mean that I am unaffected by what they are doing? No, by no means. I certainly am affected. That is why I am lying in bed right now, talking to myself. I think this characterizes most evil in this world. The consequence of people simply just following their self-interest in ways that they justify. “I was so tired the entire week.” “I need to celebrate.” “We’re all together right now. Why shouldn’t we make as much noise as we want?” “It’s just for the weekend. Surely they will understand.” But I don’t. I don’t think that there is anything particularly noble, wonderful, or celebratory about this whole coincidence of things because it […]

GRE – A First Test.

Today, I did my very first GRE at home, and let me tell you – that’s a fascinating experience to have. It was my first time experiencing at-home proctoring, which the test agency, ETS, carried out by means of a proctor who did some of the following things: If you haven’t heard of any of this before, rest assured that you’re in good company – I hadn’t either! Either way, not too sure what actual score I’m going to receive, but the test was an interesting one (as interesting as your standard issue GRE can be); it was a little bit disappointing to see the unofficial score that I’d received, given that I’d done a bit of practice and had done quite well, but I was shocked to see the result that had appeared on the screen – an estimated 320, despite PowerPrep Plus practice test scores of 331, 334, and 330 previously. I have no idea how well ETS performed the estimation, but rather than reject it, I’ve decided to take it seriously and take action along the way, because what this result showed me was that maybe I had been a bit too presumptuous about my own strengths and abilities to the point that I thought that I’d be able to game the test. Still, I think it was a shock and a wake-up call to try a little harder and not to give up and, accordingly, to carry on with the articles of mental development that the GRE has brought about – because the GRE certainly has brought about many of these things in the week or so that I’ve spent preparing. #1: To become more efficient at writing. The GRE has definitely taught me to write much more efficiently and to structure my writing – to get much better at deciding what parts of my argument should […]