Every now and then, a new application comes along that gets everyone excited (and even a little nervous) about the possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI). ChatGPT is the latest trend and has been taking the internet by storm. Launched in November 2022 by OpenAI, built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models, ChatGPT has been fine-tuned using supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. This has led to a ‘bot’ that can interact with the user in a ‘conversational way’, OpenAI has described. Because of its ability to answer follow up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests it can be used to assist the user in almost limitless ways. You can ask it pertinent questions about the history of a country, to help you write or rewrite a speech or presentation, give you ideas for a birthday gift and improve a section of code. The options are endless. I could have used it to write this article – if it wasn’t always ‘at capacity’.
Unfortunately, only the prototype was free to use and now, following its success, there is a paid for subscriber version too. For $20/month you won’t be faced by the annoying ‘at capacity’ message and have faster response times. Although, this may be justified as estimates currently sit at around $3 million per month to continue running ChatGPT, which is around $100,000 per day – and that is supposedly the cost of the servers only. A lot has also been spent on training the AI not to produce offensive content, despite when being asked to by users. OpenAI claims it has safeguards in place in order to “build a safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence.”
But how good is it? Can it write as well as a human? Is this the start of us being replaced by robots? It has been criticised by some for its factual inaccuracy, particularly in when dealing with code. However, reports are overwhelmingly positive. More so than anything that has come before it, ChatGPT is capable of producing just about any kind of text or written output to a quality that – very nearly – appears as if it was written by a human. So, it may be able to write as well as humans, but it is missing some things. The World Economic Forum has stated that while some jobs may become redundant; people won’t. Emotional intelligence, empathy and the ability to solve multiple problems at once are all skills that only humans can do. Instead, we should work with AI. Use it to do the jobs it can do – use it to automate the mundane and routine. Freeing us up to concentrate on developing and using skills that machines don’t have yet. And might not do for some time. So yes, ChatGTPs chat is pretty good. But not yet good enough to write your dissertation.
It has been criticised by some for its factual inaccuracy, particularly in when dealing with code.
The World Economic Forum has stated that while some jobs may become redundant; people won’t.