front matter
preface
“O brave new world, that has such people in it!” That quote is from William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and is spoken by the child Miranda when she encounters a crowd of people for the first time. You’re unlikely to have been banished to a remote island as a child, but you may still find yourself echoing Miranda’s words when you encounter any of the current crop of artificial intelligence (AI) apps for the first time. It’s a brave new world, indeed, that has such chatbots in it.
Tools such as ChatGPT seem wondrous at first because they appear to be quite good at putting words together. Ask ChatGPT to Write a Shakespearean sonnet that summarizes the plot of Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road", and it will comply. No, the resulting poem won’t be Shakespeare-quality, but it will be entertaining. But after a while, this kind of cheap entertainment wears thin, and most ChatGPT users find themselves asking a question along the lines of “What is ChatGPT truly useful for?”
That’s generally a tough question to answer, with one exception: code. ChatGPT is genuinely useful for turning text instructions into programming code. In particular, ChatGPT is good at converting text into the code required to construct a web page. This is extraordinary, and it means now anyone can build a presence on the web, even if they can’t or don’t want to learn the intricacies of web development.