Why all the fuss about ChatGPT?
By Fay Capstick
The tech and wider news has been full of stories about the newest chatbot to arrive on the market, ChatGPT. This week we will look at what is it, what it does and why it is causing so much of a stir.
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is a piece of software that can hold a conversation with the user. It does this by using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP).
Chatbots are becoming more common. Your Alexa is a chatbot. Hey Siri is a chatbot. They aren’t perfect, but they are getting far better at understanding and giving appropriate responses to our requests. These chatbots are accessed via voice command but others can be accessed through text and written interaction.
Progress in tech means that chatbots are now able to hold conversations, either via voice or text, and they learn the more they are used. They use natural language understanding (NLU) and advanced AI to provide a more natural experience for the user. The goal is to not realise that you are interacting with a machine, with the idea that they could replace human agents in some jobs.
By September 2017 there were 100,000 chatbots operating on the Facebook messenger platform where they can answer customer service queries. This is usually done by the user being prompted to asks set questions and the chatbot then guiding the user through pre-set answers that help to resolve their query. As we all know, this can be extremely frustrating if your problem doesn’t fit the set criteria. The advantage for business is that these services can run 24/7 and provide a cost saving over employing actual people.
There is competition from developers to develop chatbots that can pass the Turing test. Passing the Turing test would mean that a chatbot is indistinguishable from a human when interacting with another human.
What is ChatGPT
ChatGPT (Generate Pre-trained Transformer) is a new chatbot, developed by OpenAI (https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/), that has gained a lot of media attention in the last couple of months. It has gained this attention for its comprehensive answers and background knowledge.
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence research laboratory, and was founded in 2015. Their aim is to develop friendly AI. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are among the initial founders who kick started the organisation with $1 billion in investment. In 2019 Microsoft put in a further $1 billion. A current valuation of the business, as of January 2023, is $29 billion.
In December 2022 OpenAI launched a free preview of ChatGPT, their new chatbot. Over a million users signed up in the first few days to try it. At Parker Shaw we have signed up to use it, but are still in the expectant queue. Humans were used to improve the AI’s responses and it was trained on the Microsoft Azure supercomputing structure. Users can give positive or negative feedback to the answers the chatbot gives them, thus further training it.
Why is it generating interest?
The reason that ChatGPT is generating such interest in the media and from the tech community is that it gives very detailed and articulate responses to the questions asked of it. It is able to do this across multiple areas, though its accuracy has been raised as a concern.
What have testers been asking it to do?
Many users have been trying the system out and we’ll provide a full report once our turn comes. However ChatGPT seems to have a wide skill set that goes beyond its goal of simply mimicking conversation. To prevent PR disasters, the user prompts are filtered to prevent offensive comments being fed to the chatbot.
Journalists have noted that it seems able to improvise, write and de-bug computer programmes and write student essays. The latter one will provide a worry for teachers and a potential cheat method for students. While universities have plagiarism software in place, if ChatGPT is providing unique and originally presented content, then it is likely that the detection software will not flag it up. It has been reported that academics have used the chatbot to generate exam answers that would gain good marks on degree level courses. The Atlantic have wondered about the impact the chatbot will have on college application essays.
The New York City Department of Education has removed access to ChatGPT from its school systems. This might prove an impossible challenge going forward, as It has been reported that Microsoft Bing plans to launch a search engine using the ChatGPT AI. It is rumoured that this will happen as soon as the end of March.
Creative skills have also been assessed, with ChatGPT being asked to compose music, write poetry and play games.
Conclusions
ChatGPT seems to be a progression in AI tech from previous chatbots. This will have interesting implications for businesses and users. Time will tell what the full impact will be, but it looks like this could be a big leap forward for AI in our daily life.
Final thoughts
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