Testers will be Kings
by Richard in11 Mar 2023
Everyone is excited about ChatGPT. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet because it’s not available here, but it seems quite clear that it’s going to be a world-changing technology.
Recently some friends of mine got excited about a Sudoku-style puzzle game which had apparently been invented by ChatGPT. Not only did ChatGPT invent the game, but it also coded it in HTML. The game is fun, and the fact that it was invented by an AI is incredibly impressive!
Only perhaps not. It turns out that the game already existed, as this investigation by DigitalTrends quickly proved. Amusingly, Rob Manuel tried to replicate the game creation and arrived at something rather less impressive, a game called “Tangled Tiles” in which all you can do is click on letters in a 5x5 grid, and when clicked the letters rotate sideways, giving you -1 point.
The moral of the story is that perhaps ChatGPT isn’t quite as brilliant at inventing original things as it’s cracked up to be. On the other hand, it is amazingly good at writing code, and I think it’s really going to change the way coding works. We’ll be living in a world in which the whole process is turned upside down. Right now, you tell the computer exactly what to do and it follows your instructions to the letter, sometimes resulting in a bug because you didn’t tell it the right thing. But in the future, you’ll give it vague instructions and it will write a bug-free program, but it will be your responsibility to decide whether the program really does what you want.
Coders are going to become obsolete, and testers will be kings.