Could OpenAI and Drupal 10 Play the Master and the Muse?

It’s safe to say that almost all of us have heard of ChatGPT. If you haven’t, it’s a form of artificial intelligence capable of many functions, such as a travel planner, an essay writer, an assistant, or an encyclopedic summarizer. Those functions are only the beginning. 

ChatGTP is a natural language processing tool powered by artificial intelligence, and OpenAI is the company behind it. On Monday afternoon Kevin Quillen, a Drupal expert and Principal Developer at Velir, hosted a lightning talk to echo some ways ChatGPT and OpenAI could support Drupal initiatives.

Though calm and seemingly disinterested in demeanor, Kevin seemed excited by this technology’s power. He likened its arrival to those other world-shifting moments like Windows 95, Google Search, the iPhone, and social media, which has fundamentally changed how we understand the digital and physical world. 

The key functions which Quillen noted as being supported by artificial intelligence were to: 

• Create content moderation/workflows
• Transcribe audio
• Modify the ‘tone’ of content
• Suggest content titles
• Understand/PHP errors
• Summarize content
• Personalize content for users
• Suggest taxonomy terms
• Generate new content on the fly.

Content, content, content. There is another feature called CKEditor 5 Integration which can take paragraphs of text, summarize it, respond to questions about it, and translate it into different languages. You can say, “Give me a history of Drupal in 250 words,” and it will flood forth with coherent sentences to give you a starting point. It will do so without resistance if you ask it to summarize that paragraph into something more condensed.

What is so special about this technology is that it can assist in creating, disseminating, organizing, and stylizing knowledge in a way that mimics a person’s natural language functions. Titles, themes, and even entire bodies of content can be produced by AI, in theory making people far more productive by freeing them from some of the more burdensome responsibilities, like trimming sentences or creating catchy titles. 

But when using this technology, who is the true creator? It would seem the responsibility is shifting from the human to the machine – giving people the role of editing something AI produces rather than the other way around.

About the title: Master's Muse is an exquisite, unforgettable novel about the true love affair between two artistic legends: George Balanchine, the choreographer widely considered the Shakespeare of dance, and his wife and muse, Tanaquil Le Clercq. (Ref: Simon & Schuster). The author wonders whether the affair of OpenAI and Drupal will be a perfect romance just like that. ~ Editor