Confession: I’ve been suffering from writer’s block. I don’t know “what” (if anything) has precipitated it – the current state of the world, the fact that I’m screaming toward my 67th birthday, a general malaise, or perhaps all of the above…I cannot say for sure. Just for giggles (or in an act of pure desperation), I pulled up the Chat GPT app this morning, and typed in: “Give me 500 words on writer’s block.” It only gave me 3: I got nuthin’. Thanks. I’m here all week. But seriously folks…this AI chatbot interface thing is raising serious ethical issues re: the art of creative writing. It’s just…weird. And it’s about to get weirder: ChatGPT has taken the tech world by storm, showcasing artificial intelligence (AI) with conversational abilities that go far beyond anything we’ve seen before. The viral chatbot interface is based on GPT-3, said to be one of the largest and most complex language models ever created – trained on 175 billion “parameters” (data points). However, it’s something of an open secret that its creator – the AI research organization OpenAI – is well into development of its successor, GPT-4. Rumor has it that GPT-4 will be far more powerful and capable than GPT-3. One source even went as far as claiming that the parameter count has been upped to the region of 100 trillion, although this has been disputed in colorful language by Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. […] Altman himself has dismissed the idea that it is trained…