The Top 5: ChatGPT
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Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber if this is one of those newsletters you open up all the time or look forward to each week.
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“Kitty Eats The Internet” (The New Atlantis)
Because “Just so, pet images are part of the visual language that the Internet selects for, one of its aesthetic imperatives. Pets are an important part of what the net has to say for itself; they are a clue to how we find ourselves now — how we organize our experience, how we figure what we mean.”
“The secret lives of MI6’s top female spies” (Financial Times)
Because this is an entertaining and informative essay where one of FT’s journalists interview 3 women — British MI6 agents — on what it’s like to be spies. It’s an excellent essay if you’re into spy novels!
“Can AI Write Authentic Poetry” (The MIT Press Reader)
Because Keith Holyoak writes, “Though I remain officially agnostic, for the purpose of the specific question that presently concerns us — can AI write authentic poetry? — the preponderance of evidence leads me to answer “no.” AI has no apparent path to inner experience, which I (and many others) take to be the ultimate source of authentic poetry. A major corollary of this conclusion deserves to be stated: Inner experience can’t be defined as a computational process.”
“The End of High-School English” (The Atlantic)
Because further to the article on poetry, new AI tech called ChatGPT recently set the internet abuzz. The tech writes relatively sophisticated responses to prompts. We know we have some subscribers who are teachers or professors — what do you think? “If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.”
“Why Is It So Hard For Men to Make Close Friends?” (NYT)
Because while we don’t usually include self-help articles, this stat is disconcerting: “In a 2021 survey of more than 2,000 adults in the United States, less than half of the men said they were truly satisfied with how many friends they had, while 15 percent said they had no close friends at all — a fivefold increase since 1990.”
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