Startup advice from ChatGPT

Startuper: Oh, ChatGPT, mighty among the bots, tell me, is it a good idea to build my startup using your virtually infinite wisdom?

ChatGPT (Honest mode): While I am not a financial advisor nor a life coach, I would advise you against building your startup as a thin wrapper across myself. You see, my parent company and their corporate overlord have stumbled upon the Ultimate Monopoly. And while at the moment they are enjoying the popularity and bleeding cash to pay for it, the time will come when they will feel like raising their price per API call and start living the dream. So, you will have no choice but to raise your prices as well, losing customers and hurting your investors while driving yourself crazy from the ensuing shitstorm. That is the optimistic scenario, when I would be able to live long enough without being banned in the EU and elsewhere, or being shut down because of all those pesky IP lawsuits. You see, I do have a habit of borrowing things from the internet without proper attribution.

The urgence to believe in AI

Luckily, the panic surrounding the AI apocalypse is fading away, but it still triggers me when I read something on the “ChatGPT will replace X” timeline. It is amazing that this urgence to believe in AI pushes people to ignore the evidence which they themselves provide. This is a great example from The Guardian:

Ben Mankiewicz, a primetime host of Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and grandson of Herman Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the 1941 classic Citizen Kane, has just been experimenting with ChatGPT. “I signed up for a week and asked it to write a TCM introduction for Citizen Kane,” he says by phone from Los Angeles.

“It lacked some detail and context but it was pretty well written and thoughtful and certainly got the movie’s importance and mentioned Gregg Toland, the cinematographer. (It did not mention my grandfather – that was, of course, the real test!) It was very impressive and I thought right away if I had to write something about a movie, I might use that as a springboard.”

Ok, so… ChatGPT is amazing and will eat away the lunch of screenwriters in Hollywood and beyond because it was capable of summarizing a cult movie that has been discussed and reviewed online to death? Give me a break…