Is the Local Creative Industry Ready for ChatGPT?

Is the Local Creative Industry Ready for ChatGPT?

The generative artificial intelligence from OpenAI has been all the rave since late last year and can write a song, a news story, a poem, and a film script among other things. But is the Nigerian creative industry ready for the latest technology? Vanessa Obioha asks 

By now you must have read or heard about the latest online chatbot ChatGPT from OpenAI, a company that Microsoft recently announced its interest to invest $10 billion to herald the new stage of generative artificial intelligence.

OpenAI has been working on its chatbot for several years and late last year, released it to the public to experiment with it. The reviews so far have been positive with a few offering caveats on how the chatbot can impede creativity, distribute misinformation and perhaps encourage cheating as has been complained about in some schools in the United States.

This reporter tried out the efficiency of the chatbot which is built on the OpenAI GPT-3 language model by asking it to write a song, a poem, a short film script and even a news story. The chatbot delivered these tasks at a speed that human beings cannot match: less than one minute.

“Its speed and knowledge resources behind it is just like magic,” said Isime Esene, a media professional who asked ChatGPT to write an essay and it was delivered in less than 10 seconds.

Musician Seun Olota tried using the chatbot to generate lyrics. This is his impression. 

“The lyrics can be much more than humans can think at such a fast pace.” 

ChatGPT is able to answer simple prompts in clear and concise prose by culling digital text from sites such as Wikipedia, blogs, social media and other parts of the internet. One of its appeals is its ability to continue a conversation without losing its train of thoughts. For instance, when this reporter asked about THISDAY Newspapers, it clearly gave a brief description of the national daily. Its response was followed by another question relating to the paper and it again, answered without breaking the line of thoughts. 

Another allure of the chatbot is its capacity to offer a variety of answers to a repeated prompt. No matter how many times it was asked to write a love song for a crush, it generated different answers.

“The artificial intelligence in it is so amazing that you can engage, interact with it and ask it to tweak a few things,” added Esene.

As appealing as the latest chatbot is, it comes with a caveat: it is not 100 per cent accurate. It even prompts you that its knowledge is limited to 2021. When asked if it knew the Executive Editor of THISDAY Newspapers, Shaka Momodu, ChatGPT mistook it for Dele Momodu, the publisher of Ovation Magazine. However, it apologised when it was notified of the mix-up, throwing into the dustbin the argument that A.I. cannot be sentient. A policy prompt also comes up when racist and discriminatory questions are asked.

Olota, on the other hand, found its logic sometimes incoherent.

“As regards the lyrics generator, the lyrics can be voluminous that one could scoop three or more songs of it but, in terms of logic, the lines after lines may not be coherent, so the human touch will still be needed.”

With the next version of the chatbot, ChatGPT 4 rumoured to be released sometime this year, such inaccuracies may be minimised.

In the United States, there are growing concerns about the use of ChatGPT in education. Few reports suggest that the chatbot answers are so accurate that it could lead to widespread cheating and change the traditional methods of teaching. For Esene, the benefits outweigh the risks as long as regulations are put in place. 

In the creative space, Esene sees the online chatbot as a powerful tool.

“I think it will revolutionise the way people work and engage professionally. For people who do coding, content creation and a lot of other things, it can be used for a myriad of things. I do not believe that it will stifle creativity because I feel that it will augment or complement people’s creativity. For instance, if you have writer’s block or need a jolt, you can use ChatGPT to maybe get a first paragraph or sentence to start with, then you can now continue from there.”

He argued further that no matter how good AI is, there’s still a chance for human intervention.

For the renowned and cerebral filmmaker Femi Odugbemi, it is a bit premature to “pontificate on a technology that I suspect will totally upend creative processes and the concept of authorship in storytelling and visual narratives.”

Although he is still studying generative AI, he submitted that the creative industries in Nigeria and Africa are still dealing with basic existential issues of capacity building, project funding and distribution.

“The digital animation and virtual fields of the industry aren’t yet empowered enough to develop even at the pace of the rest of the tech industry in Nigeria. Generative artificial intelligence will inevitably impact global trends in storytelling. The Nigerian audience is sophisticated enough to engage it but will the local industry be ready for it? It’s a conversation that should start now.”

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