[No spoilers] This was a bit of a mind bender for me: I was halfway through "Revelation Space" by Alastair Reynolds when ChatGPT was released. Throughout the b

[No spoilers] This was a bit of a mind bender for me: I was halfway through "Revelation Space" by Alastair Reynolds when ChatGPT was released. Throughout the book, it is common for characters to use natural language to delegate technical tasks to AI helpers, and then review the results later. As somebody who does a lot of technical work and had hands-on experience with GPT-2 this seemed quite implausible. A few months ago I couldn't just instruct an AI to go find X and Y and then calculate Z and show me a visualization of that. But now with copilot, Bing, ChatGPT, et al this is a pretty standard task! Using natural language to instruct an AI to find some information or write a first rough draft of some code is no longer some far-future fiction. The timing with ChatGPT dropping when I was halfway through the book meant that one of the elements of its world went from feeling very "sci-fi" to being quite ordinary. o_0