Chihuahuas, Cats, and ChatGPT
The perpetual content creation machine will run out of steam
I took a break from my gig as a nightclub manager in Chicago around 1998 to visit my former girlfriend and still friend Sabrina in Eugene, Oregon. Her mom moved with her from LA, and greeted me with an SUV crawling with agitated chihuahuas. “You want to take one?” she asked, apparently having plenty of chihuahuas to spare. “I’m a breeder. Aren’t they cute?”
Gidget, the “yo quiero” Taco Bell campaign chihuahua was the rage at the time, fueling an unprecedented demand for chihuahuas, a trend Sabrina’s mom translated into a chihuahua breeding business that did pretty well even up there in the Pacific Northwest. “Which one do you want?” she asked. “I can’t tell,” I gasped, trying to fend them off. “They all look alike.”
They instructed me that chihuahuas are not the same. Divided into deer-head and apple-head varieties, chihuahuas also come in long- and short-hair versions. The chihuahuas swarming her car were discernibly apple-headed short-hair types, and each had their own distinct chihuahua look and chihuahua personality. “The little guy with the spots is our favorite!”
I lived with a feral cat in my Chicago apartment, which I figured would preclude any cross-state pet importation. “Cats love chihuahuas!” assured Sabrina’s mom, eager for me to take a chihuahua home. Sabrina’s mom was as adorable as Sabrina, so I almost succumbed to their enthusiasm, but eventually declined their generous offer out of concern for the hassle.
On the flight back, relieved to be free of chihuahuas, I indulged my vivid imagination with chihuahua fantasies. Speculating about the logistics of cat-chihuahua cohabitation, I concocted a far-fetched scheme whereby I need not feed nor clean either animal by initiating a perverse “human centipede” ecosystem, swapping a cat and chihuahau for the humans.
By feeding the cat once, I calculated, the chihuahua would then eat the cat shit, the cat, in turn, eating the chihuahua shit. Such an organic perpetual motion machine was impossible to engineer on thermodynamic and metabolic principles alone — and very creepy — but gave me tremendous joy. No more food or cat box mess, and both animals hopefully sedated.
Many years and lives later, the AI revolution triggered with large language models exemplified by ChatGPT blew up. Pollyanna about most things, I’m also optimistic about these amazing tools being more beneficial than destructive, but that’s another conversation. Here I’m talking about my wonder at seeing data that I just asked ChatGPT to capture in this chart:
The y-axis scales billions of pieces of content, which ChatGPT describes as individual units of digital content from blogs, articles, social media posts, videos, captions, documents, podcasts, emails, software code — or anything and everything humans create and post online. The x-axis is the date in years, broken into decimal halves because ChatGPT is sometimes geeky.
I asked the omnibot to identify the point at which LLM-created content exceeds human-created content, and got the result 2034, or less than ten years from now. In other words, the hungry bots are busy chewing up and analyzing the 147 or so zettabytes (trillion gigabytes) of human content and spewing it back, within a decade outpacing us in terms of overall volume.
If you care and are paying attention, you also likely see where I’m headed with all this — if the arithmetic decline in human-created content and the exponential growth in bot-created content continue, human creation will reach zero, begging the question of what the bots will feed on. Like my hypothetical cat and chihuahua, ChatGPT will be eating its own shit.
By then the once-mythical and now-inevitable emergence of Artificial General Intelligence could happen, resulting in bots creating their own original content, making us superfluous. Whether this signals the end of our species, or luxurious lives of all play and no work remains to be seen — but until then, I think my cat-chihuahua circle of life analog is funny.
Other people found it less so, but I don’t care, and neither does ChatGPT — at least for now. Meanwhile, the convenience of researching things online is epic, the Google box overshadowed by the AI-bot box, busy aggregating information, misinformation, and the good, bad, and ugly of human grandeur and shittiness. And with that, we’ve all come full circle for now…
Here’re a few more thoughts on the subject…
