A chat box. That is all it looks like. A plain text field on a plain page, and you type into it, and it answers you, and it answers you well.
I have been playing with it for a fortnight, and I keep having the same experience. I set out to catch it being stupid and end up genuinely arguing with it. Not because it is right — it is often wrong, and sure of itself while it is wrong. But because it is coherent, and coherence is not something I ever expected a machine to hand me for free.
The image generators were a shock to a craft. This feels like a shock to something larger, and I am still working out what. It is not that it can write. It is that language, which has been the interface between one human mind and another for the whole of our history, has quietly become an interface to a machine as well.
Everything I know how to do, I know how to describe. Everything a client wants, they eventually put into words. If words are now a way of instructing a system directly, then a great deal of the connective tissue of my work — the translation between what somebody meant and what got built — is about to become very strange.
I do not have the shape of this yet. I only know that I have felt the ground move like this twice before: once with a telephone in 2007, and once on a racetrack when I was twenty-two. This feels like the third time.
I am not frightened. I am wide awake, which is a much better place to be. Whatever this turns into, I would rather be early and wrong than late and safe.