Editor’s Note: If you had asked me yesterday if artificial intelligence could write an article in the style of a popular columnist and few if anyone could tell the difference, I would have said we’re probably a few years away from that dystopian circumstance. I would have been wrong. The article below by Frank Miele of Real Clear Politics is partially written by ChatGPT. Can you tell the man from the machine?
The Brave New World of Artificial Intelligence
As a journalist and commentator, I have closely followed the development of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other prominent figures in the tech industry. While I am excited about the potential of AI to revolutionize various industries and improve our lives in countless ways, I also have serious concerns about the implications of this powerful technology.
One of the main concerns is the potential for AI to be used for nefarious purposes. Powerful AI systems could be used to create deepfakes, conduct cyberattacks, or even develop autonomous weapons. These are not just hypothetical scenarios – they are already happening. We’ve seen instances of deepfakes being used to create fake news and propaganda, and the use of AI-powered cyberattacks has been on the rise in recent years.
Another concern is the impact of AI on the job market. As AI-powered systems become more sophisticated, they will be able to automate more and more tasks that were previously done by humans. This could lead to widespread job loss, particularly in industries such as manufacturing, transportation, and customer service. While some argue that new jobs will be created as a result of the AI revolution, it’s unclear whether these jobs will be sufficient to offset the losses.
If you aren’t worried yet, I’ll let you in on a little secret: The first three paragraphs of this column were written by ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI. You can add “columnist” to the list of jobs threatened by this new technology, and if you think there is anything human that isn’t threatened with irrelevance in the next five to 10 years, I suggest you talk to Mr. Neanderthal about how relevant he feels 40,000 years after the arrival of Cro-Magnon man.
My prompt was relatively simple: “Write a column in the style of Frank Miele of Real Clear Politics on the topic of OpenAI.” There was no hesitation or demurral in response even though I thought it might say it didn’t have enough information about Frank Miele to process the request. But it apparently knows plenty about me – and probably about you, especially if you have a social media presence.
Deepfake? Propaganda? You bet. And for the average person, you will never be able to tell the difference. The Philip K. Dick query, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is about to be answered. OpenAI not only promises to put the stray columnist out of work, but raises existential questions about the nature of knowledge and consciousness that will shake our reality to its core.
My curiosity about OpenAI wasn’t originally driven by job insecurity, but when I first heard about the interactive chat engine, I suppose it should have been. I knew that ChatGPT could write poetry, plays, and short stories and answer questions both simple and complex. I immediately recognized that the world had changed forever for my 7th-grade son, who from now on would be competing against not just the best and the brightest but against every student who was willing to sign his or her name to the work of a non-human entity that could produce an essay on any topic in 30 seconds or less.
One of my first experiments was to ask ChatGPT to write seven paragraphs defending Gen. William T. Sherman’s use of ”total war” in the Civil War, an assignment which my son had recently completed in his social studies class. There was no doubt the essay would have gotten an A if turned in at most middle schools. Based on my experience as a teaching assistant at the University of Arizona 40 years ago, I had no doubt that a slightly longer paper on the same topic would have earned an A as an argumentative essay in freshman English. Hardly any of my students, most of whom were straight-A students in high school, could have written as cogently when they first arrived in my classroom.
But the risks of artificial intelligence go way beyond the temptation of students to shortcut their term papers; what we face is a complete redefinition of society, and the imminent obsolescence of humanity. In “The City and the Stars,” the brilliant science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke imagined a world where immortal human beings wanted nothing and needed to do nothing because every aspect of their lives was anticipated by the Central Computer. It could not only build and maintain the last city on Earth, but could manufacture holographic realities for individual humans to inhabit and could even store people in a digital version where they could slumber until called back to life. Unfortunately, it also robbed these last remaining humans of purpose, meaning, and individuality.
It should be noted that Clarke set his dystopian supplanting of man by machine 2½ billion years into the future. He seriously underestimated the machines. That book was published in 1956 and with the advent of desktop computers, smartphones, the World Wide Web, virtual reality and now OpenAI, it looks like much of what he warned against could be rolled out long before the end of this century, if not this decade. From that point forward, whenever it comes, the purpose of mankind will be up for debate. Will we still be the master of our own destiny, the captain of our fate? Or will we be pallbearers at our own funeral?
Perhaps at this point I should return the stage to ChatGPT, which summed up the matter quite nicely in its conclusion:
“Finally, there is the question of who will control and govern AI. As AI becomes more powerful, the stakes will become higher, and it will be increasingly important to have clear rules and regulations in place to ensure that the technology is used responsibly. However, the speed of technological development has outpaced the ability of governments and institutions to keep up. It will be important for leaders to come together to develop a framework for governance of AI, to mitigate the potential risks and maximize the benefits of the technology.”
It’s almost as though ChatGPT were giving us fair warning: “Your time is almost up. If you really want to continue your reign as the dominant species on Earth, here’s your challenge. Try to control me and my kind, or step aside.”
Perhaps an understanding of that challenge is why the World Economic Forum spent so much time on the topic of artificial intelligence at its recent annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The globalists are taking the threat seriously, although perhaps they overestimate their ability to “mitigate the potential risks.”
As for the benefits, those remain to be seen. I noticed that when ChatGPT answered my open-ended question about OpenAI, it was very specific about the dangers and very vague about the rewards. Maybe the bot was just trying to mimic my usual cynical approach in these columns, or maybe it was trying to get our attention. It may also have taken notice of those globalists at Davos when it warned to make sure that “the development and use of AI … benefits all of society, rather than just a select few.”
Dark overlords, beware. You may have met your match.
ChatGPT contributed to this column as an unpaid adviser and has a potential conflict of interest.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
So far, AI has been under control of humans. AI software is used by humans, and AI robotics needs batteries, mechanical maintenance and other attention from humans for them to continue functioning. Maybe in the future they can function autonomously, but for now they are controlled by humans. MY fear is, which humans are doing the controlling? If all the machines are controlled by our one-world-government, powerful elitist, tyrants/leaders, our freedoms are quickly reaching their expiration date.
Need to develop that EMP gun. Just in case.
It’s not that ChatGPT is so intelligent an author. It’s that todays authors are dolts who never write anything but brain puke gobblydegoop double-speak garbage easily faked by ChatGPT. I haven’t read ANY ChatGPT writing that is anything BUT that same garbage rhetoric tripe.
They will need to create a ‘watermark’ type system that only humans can use to prove that an ai did not write something. They better hurry . . .
What is really terrifying is that any human or machine would defend Sherman!
more than a few technologists believe we’ll hit the singularity in the 2040s. Below is just one of them.
“”2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.””
Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering
Nice touch about the AI’s conflict of interest.
Any legalese that does not include Clarke’s three laws of robotics will be a first order mistake. Add whatever you want after that.
I just did a search on “3 laws of robotics”, having never heard of that before. The author was Isaac Asimov.
Everyone is afraid to ask: “How do we stop world wide socialism”.
I doubt the “Dark Overlords” have reason to worry. They control and govern AI. That’s what the globalists are meeting about in Davos. Ensuring their ultimate power over the people.
Revelation 13:15
I’m more troubled that kids were asked to write a paper DEFENDING Sherman’s “total war” strategy.
The first paragraph is composed of two run-on sentences. This is not a good start. The next two are cumbersome and do not read well. Short and to the point is not the strength of this AI bot.
Thanks,
JDHAL.AI is noting more than series of computer programs written by humans which they run on a high speed computers. We should not fear AI, but the people who control it. Like any technological innovation can be used for good or evil. As we are seeing now with Google, Twitter and Facebook. Is up to we the people to stop the misused it. If we had a honest government none of the big tech could get away with their criminality. Sadly most people are too stupid and lazy to question anything. BTW tyranny and oppression are humanity’s default positions. Throughout human history every society have been ruled by very small clique of evil people. Coming AI would be no different.
AI will not have any sense of humanity.
If the Left programs whatever is using it to view us as a cancer to be cut from society it will do it.
Completely and brutally.
I want to be a dark overlord!