Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, each devoted decades to reporting, writing and book authorship.
Gage poured his tragic family story and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a bestselling memoir that led John Malkovich to play him in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes transitioned his skills as a daily newspaper reporter into writing widely-read books about literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the duo to try fiddling with AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to falsehoods and lack of attribution. The friends commiserated and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted work they allege “has been systematically pilfered by” OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.
“It’s highway robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office next to the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.
I mostly agree with you, but I don’t think it’s a fading fad. There was way too much AI hype, way too early. However, it gets gradually but noticeably better with each new release. It’s been a game changer for my coworkers and me at work.
Our merciless greedy overlords will always choose software over human employees whenever they can. Software doesn’t sleep, take breaks, call out sick, etc. Right now it makes too many mistakes. That will change.
Fair enough. I’ve spent enough words making my point and anything else would be redundant. Time will tell. Probably within a couple of years - whenever venture capital gets antsy for actual results/profits instead of promising leads.