Imagine if Siri on your phone could write a college essay or Alexa could craft a Shakespeare-style movie review.
The OpenAI company has opened up access to ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot that interacts with users in an eerily convincing and conversational way. Its ability to provide lengthy, thoughtful, and complete responses to even if imprecise questions and requests has astounded users, including academics and the technology industry.
The tool quickly went viral. Already in the first week, the co-founder of Open AI, Sam Altman, an important investor from Silicon Valley, in the United States, said on Twitter that ChatGPT surpassed one million users. The robot has also caught the eye of some prominent technology leaders, such as Box CEO Aaron Levie.
“There is a certain feeling that happens when a new technology adjusts your thinking about computing. Google did it. Firefox did that. AWS did it. The iPhone did that. OpenAI is doing this with ChatGPT,” Levie said on Twitter.
But as with other AI-based tools, this one also raises potential concerns, including how it could disrupt the creative industries, perpetuate prejudice and spread misinformation.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a large language model trained on a huge trove of information stored online to create your responses. It comes from the same company behind DALL-E, which generates a seemingly limitless range of images in response to user requests. It is also the next iteration of the GPT-3 text generator.
after if subscribe to ChatGPT, users can ask the AI system to answer a series of questions, such as “Who was the President of the United States in 1955” or summarize difficult concepts in a way that a second grader can understand. It still addresses open questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” or “What should I wear if it’s 40 degrees today?”.
“It depends on the activities you plan to do. If you plan to go out, wear a light jacket or sweater, long pants and closed-toe shoes,” replied ChatGPT. “If you plan on staying indoors, you can wear a T-shirt and jeans or other comfortable clothing.”
But some users are very creative.
How people are using the tool
One person asked the chatbot to rewrite the 90s hit “Baby Got Back” in the style of “The Canterbury Tales”; another wrote a letter to remove an invalid account from a credit report (instead of using a credit repair attorney).
Other picturesque examples were asking for home decor tips inspired by fairy tales and the answer to a question on a university-level test (the tool responded with a 5-paragraph essay about the book O Morro dos Ventos Ventos Uivantes).
ok only @OpenAI‘s new #ChatGPT can basically just generate #AIart prompts. I asked a one-line question, and typed the answers verbatim straight into MidJourney and boom. Times are getting weird…🤯 pic.twitter.com/sYwdscUxxf
—Guy Parsons (@GuyP) November 30, 2022
In a blog post, OpenAI said that “the format enables the tool to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect assumptions, and reject inappropriate requests.”
A week after launch, the page to try ChatGPT was down, citing “unusually high demand”. “Hang in there as we work to scale our systems,” the message read. Now it appears to be online again.
Possible problems
Although ChatGPT successfully responded to a variety of questions submitted by CNN some answers were visibly wrong.
In fact, Stack Overflow — a Q&A platform for coders and programmers — has temporarily banned users from sharing ChatGPT information, noting that it is “substantially harmful to the site and users who are asking or looking for correct answers.”
Aside from the issue of spreading misinformation, the tool can also threaten some writing professions, be used to explain problematic concepts, and, as with all artificial intelligence tools, perpetuate biases based on the dataset it is trained on. Typing a prompt involving a CEO, for example, might generate a response assuming the individual is white and male.
“While we’ve made efforts to have the model refuse inappropriate requests, it sometimes responds to harmful instructions or exhibits biased behavior,” Open AI said on its website.
“We are using the Moderation API to warn or block certain types of unsafe content, but we expect there to be some false negatives and positives for now. We look forward to collecting user feedback to help our continued work on improving the system.”
Still, Lian Jye Su, director of research at market research firm ABI Research, warns that the chatbot is operating “without a contextual understanding of the language.”
“It’s very easy for the tool to give plausible but incorrect or nonsensical answers,” he said. “She guessed when she should come clean and sometimes responded to hurtful instructions or exhibited biased behavior. It also lacks regional and country-specific understanding.”
At the same time, however, it provides a glimpse into how companies can capitalize on developing more robust virtual assistance, as well as patient and customer care solutions.
Although the DALL-E tool is free, it limits the number of requests a user can make before paying. When Elon Musk, co-founder of OpenAI, recently asked Altman on Twitter about the average cost per chat of ChatGPT, Altman said, “We’re going to have to monetize it somehow at some point; the computing costs are to die for”.
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
