The two-year anniversary of ChatGPTPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter4 min readJust now-- Welcome backIssue #221: your thoughts on AI-generated writing + a tour of Parisian bookstoresChatGPT is as old as some of my friends kids now. It turned two last Saturday, and I remember exactly where I was when it was announced to the world. We were sitting in a friends living room in San Francisco talking about the movie M3GAN, which was premiering around the same time (the trailer was everywhere). It stars a ventriloquist doll who develops human intelligence and stages a murder-suicide. (Fun!)Weird how culture converges around a theme sometimes.I was writing some marketing copy for Medium, and I was working so hard on it my friend was just like, Why dont you ask ChatGPT what Medium is? She did and it did an okay job! I didnt use the copy because it sounded boring and was wrong in subtle ways, but it was unsettling and a little awe-inspiring to see how capable this tool already was. (No, we do not use ChatGPT to write this newsletter.)Anyway. Whether youve used it to code, play D&D, or peer into your fridge and tell you what to cook (or not) its arguably the most important invention of the last decade. ChatGPTs monthly userbase grew to 100M within two months of its release, making it the fastest-growing app in history (TikTok took nine months to reach that milestone; Facebook took four years).The technology is not as new as it feels. GPT = generative pre-trained transformer, a fancy term for a system that converts text into numbers and maps the probability of a character string appearing next in a sequence. OpenAI has been working on these models since 2017. Rudimentary language training models based on the same principles date back to the 60s. The first one was created in 1966. It was called Eliza and built to sound like a therapist.So, OpenAI didnt invent something new they improved upon something half a century old. Its not a fundamentally more capable model than what we had previously, one OpenAI researcher admitted last year, but the teams meticulous attention to how it might be used made it take off. The interface is intuitive; it guides you toward using it successfully. GPT aside, I think theres a lesson here about the value of attending to details.On Medium, Georgia Tech professor Mark Riedl explains how it works and shares a tip: Dont anthropomorphize. Humans have an innate tendency to see humanity in all things, but LLMs are not human and youre not having a conversation with them (journalists keep getting confused about this). Harris SockelYour thoughts on writing and AIOn Monday, we sent a newsletter on what AI means for the future of writing. Many of you had strong feelings on this topic! Here are a few responses that stood out to us.Andrew Wagnerinvokes an Apple Intelligence ad:[This newsletter] reminded me of David Ogilvys assertion that People who think well, write well (wonder if Paul has been reading some Ogilvy : ) Also reminded me of this Apple Intelligence ad which perfectly sums up one of the scariest things about AI to me anyway. If Ogilvy is correct (and I think he is), that people who think well, write well, then why do we want to create tools that mask bad thinkers (like Warren, in the ad)?Mollie Coradisagrees with the premise that a world where you dont need to write = a world where you dont need to thinkI would strongly disagree with this statement. I know enough people in the STEM fields to know not everyone needs regular reading and writing to think critically.and jotisPC believes that human progress depends on skilled storytellers (i.e. writers):Human progress is crafted by those who can write. Or tell stories. And at the base of that is the improvement of thought that comes from writing or storytelling. [] Imagine if the (US) Constitution had been written by the non-thinkers of the United Colonies instead of debated and crafted by those who were disciples of classical thought. While the masses have been successful revolutionaries at times in history, unless they had thinkers who could communicate at the helm, chaos was waiting not far down the road. A good sentence I highlighted recentlyA bookstore isnt like most stores, where you walk in, hand over money, and walk out. Its more like a contemporary museum, with artifacts in the form of books. photographer William Sidnam, via his visual tour of Parisian bookstores