A word about ChatGPT EDITORIAL GLASS CANADA June 2024 Volume 36 • Number 2 Annex Business Media P.O. Box 530, Simcoe, Ontario N3Y 4N5 READER SERVICE Print and digital subscription inquiries or changes, please contact Angelita Potal, Customer Service Rep. Tel: 416.510.5113 Fax: 416.510.6875 Email: apotal@annexbusinessmedia.com Mail: 111 Gordon Baker Rd., Suite 400, Toronto, ON M2H 3R1 EDITOR/PUBLISHER | Patrick FLANNERY pflannery@annexbusinessmedia.com 226.931.0545 GROUP PUBLISHER | Danielle LABRIE dlabrie@annexbusinessmedia.com 519.429.5187 ASSOCIATE EDITOR | Macenzie REBELO mrebelo@annexbusinessmedia.com 416.510.6851 BRAND SALES MANAGER | Leslie OS-BORNE losborne@annexbusinessmedia.com 647.280.5885 ACCOUNT COORDINATOR | Barb COMER bcomer@annexbusinessmedia.com 519.429.5171 AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER | Shawn ARUL sarul@annexbusinessmedia.com 416.510.5181 MEDIA DESIGNER | Alison KEBA CEO | Scott JAMIESON sjamieson@annexbusinessmedia.com SUBSCRIPTION RATES Canada -1 Year $37.74 (plus tax) U.S.A. -1 Year $86.70 (in CDN dollars) Publication Mail Agreement #40065710 Printed in Canada ISSN 0843-7041 Occasionally, Glass Canada will mail information on behalf of industry-related groups whose products and services we believe may be of interest to you. If you prefer not to receive this information, please contact our circulation department in any of the four ways listed above. Annex Privacy Officer privacy@annexbusinessmedia.com Tel: 800-668-2374 No part of the editorial content of this publication may be reprinted without the publisher’s written permis-sion. ©2024 Annex Business Media. All rights reserved. Opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editor or the publisher. No liability is assumed for errors or omissions. All advertising is subject to the publisher’s approval. Such approval does not imply any en-dorsement of the products or services advertised. Publisher reserves the right to refuse advertising that does not meet the standards of the publication. AI won’t replace human voices in these pages. At Top Glass Ten in April (an incredible couple of days, by the way) I hosted our Meet the Fabricators panel with Adam Franklin (Saand), Ray Wakefield (Trulite) and Andrew Dolphin (BVGlazing). One of my notes for questions to ask was simply “AI AI AI.” Ever since Tesla showed people cars could drive themselves and ChapGPT showed people software could instantly generate intelligible copy, artifi-cial intelligence seems to be the only technology people can talk about in relation to almost any topic. We’ve been hearing for a long time now that AI can optimize fabrication processes by collecting and processing data on material use, time spent on tasks, maintenance intervals, scheduling and more. On the installation side, there are op-portunities for collecting data to improve logistics, equipment maintenance, safety and work quality. The possibilities are exciting but are probably not being deployed by anyone other than the largest players. The theoretical endpoint of AI and auto-mation where the factory runs itself without any people in it and the product gets shipped and installed by robots is still a long way off. But AI has another potential application that is much closer to implementation: creating magazines like this one. At Christmas last year my family sat around the din-NEXT ISSUE ner table after the meal while my brother played with ChatGPT on his phone. He had the AI compose songs • Great Glazing about each of us, complete with chords, then picked • Deki Home them out on his guitar. The results were hilarious, but • AI safety also astonishing and a bit unnerving. All he needed to do was put in a simple prompt and seconds later an composition was complete. The songs weren’t great but they were no worse than a lot of the crap you already hear. I haven’t played with it extensively but hypothetically it should be possible to generate an article on some general information. If it could generate something half decent, it would save me hours of time and our magazine hundreds of dollars in freelance writing costs. There it is: the fear that a new technology will cost jobs, brought for the first time to the creative sector. Our jobs here at the magazine seem safe enough for the pres-ent. ChatGPT can’t interview Canadian glazing contractors, understand what they have to say and write an article about them that captures what’s interesting about their businesses. Whether we are conscious of it or not, every time we read something we have an assumption that a human wrote those words. How we react depends on our assumption that the writer knew what they meant and intended to convey the message on the page. AI does not have awareness. To present its work to you in the same way we present a human work would be dishonest. That’s why I commit to you here that you won’t read AI-generated copy in Glass Canada without attribution as such. And I’ll make every effort to make sure AI-generated images are flagged, too. It’s important for you to be confident that what you read here is the product of the real insight and judgement of human being. www.glasscanadamag.com @GlassCanadaMag 4 June 2024 | GLASS CANADA
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