Italy intends to ban new Chat GPT app that its manufacturers promote as a tool for popular use based on artificial intelligence (AI). Germany considers it. This episode illustrates one of the most passionate debates of the moment, but one of the least passionate. Many phenomena are synthesized in it. The first is that of the human drive to prohibit the new because it is unknown in order to protect the established order. Ban GPT Chat it sounds like the bonfires of the Inquisition against the printing press. An exercise as spectacular as it is useless, mere populist exhibitionism to appear to be stopping the supposed forces of evil. Italy and Germany they know that they will not be able to fulfill that promise unless they become autocracies like china or russia. The second question is what exactly do you intend to prohibit? Well, actually, we are facing a great marketing operation of the worst kind. GPT Chat is for Microsoft what Metaverse went to Facebook just a year ago: the creation of expectations to attract investors to help them develop an incipient tool from which they sell all their features before being able to make them viable. As some sensible scientists say, GPT Chat is neither intelligence nor artificial. It is a large database that pirates content from a multitude of sources and presents it in an interface that combines citations according to more or less successful mimesis exercises. It would be intelligence if intelligence were only memory. And it would be artificial if copying digital files was less natural than making photocopies. But the promotional campaign of its authors has led to the opening of a debate in which expectations are explained as realities and even some foolish media is already beginning to talk about the jobs that are going to be lost. The Metaverse counter-propaganda machine has worked almost better than fossil fuels against nuclear power or banks against cryptocurrencies. It is logical that the dominators of a situation do not want to lose their position.
Some considerations to calm this debate: no matter how popular we make it, AI is not an operational reality today, among other things because our degree of knowledge of human intelligence is so low that we will hardly be able to imitate it; Until today, none of the latest great technological advances have been announced in a ‘road show’ for shareholders, neither the mobile, nor Google nor the applications; If governments really want to protect citizens, do not prohibit them from what is useful to them, force these companies to make their algorithms public how Modernity brought the printing press to its knees by protecting copyrights and demanding the derived responsibilities. Technology has been freeing us from cumbersome tasks and tricky intermediaries for centuries. Every jump brings winners and losers. We are moving towards a world in which nerds can no longer be civil servants and copycats can no longer pose as journalists. But that’s not bad for all of humanity, just for some.