ChatGPT Is Scarily Good
The recent release of ChatGPT has taken AI chat to a new level, with academics stunned at its essay writing skills and others impressed with its conversational abilities.
ChatGPT is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text generation AIs and is created by the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation. It was publicly released for free for a limited period to generate feedback.
Since the release of the new version, users have been working with the bot through various channels. Some of these conversations were posted on Twitter. C
Other interactions have been at the academic level. For example, Dan Gillmore, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, set the AI the same task he gave his students and said he would have given it a “good grade.”
Gillmore asked the AI to write a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. In one of its passages, the AI wrote, "if you’re unsure about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as being a scam.”
Gillmore assessed that the AI was so good that “academia has some very serious issues to confront.”
ChatGPT can self-censor and understands when it is being asked an impossible question. For example, when asked to describe what happened when Columbus arrived in America in 2015, ChatGPT recognized the falsehood of the question and warned that any answer would be fictional.
The bot is also capable of refusing to answer queries altogether. Ask it for advice on stealing a car, and the bot will say that “stealing a car is a serious crime that can have severe consequences” and instead gives advice such as “using public transportation.”
OpenAI said the new AI was created to focus on ease of use. “The dialog format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” the organization said in its release announcement.
Conversations with the AI posted to Twitter show how it can explain scientific concepts, write scenes for a play and university presentations and deliver functional lines of computer code.
"Its answer to the question 'what to do if someone has a heart attack' was incredibly clear and relevant," Claude de Loupy, head of Syllabs, a French company specializing in automatic text generation, told news agency AFP.
"When you start asking very specific questions, ChatGPT's response can be off the mark," but its overall performance remains "really impressive," with a "high linguistic level," he said.
OpenAI was cofounded in 2015 by Elon Musk, who has since left the business. The company received USD1 billion in funding from Microsoft in 2019.
Image credit: iStockphoto/LagartoFilm
