We’ve been talking about the possibilities of AI and machine learning for quite some time at Sapere, so we were interested to see the rapid rise of the AI writing tool ChatGPT.
For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence writing tool, which started out as a chatbot and is now being put to use writing all sorts of content.
In this instalment of Software Surgery, we’ll talk you through what it can do and attempt to answer the burning question: are robots really taking over?
Where did ChatGPT come from?
In a nutshell, it’s an artificial intelligence tool that allows users to generate content. Users can ask it questions or give it creative briefs, and (so the thinking goes) it will create your desired content, whether that’s a poem, a story or an essay.
ChatGPT was created by a company called OpenAI and launched in November of 2022. The firm, which was partly founded by Elon Musk, is dedicated to the research and development of artificial intelligence and has a number of similar products on the market.
What can it do?
It can write content and it can do it quickly. Users simply give it a brief (the more detailed, the better) and it will create a piece of written content to your specifications.
Is it any good? Yes and no. It is prone to errors and repetition and suffers from a lack of common sense. For instance, psychologist Steven Pinker highlights that when ChatGPT was asked if Mabel was alive at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., was she alive at noon? it responded, ‘it was not specified whether Mabel was alive at noon. She’s known to be alive at 9 and 5, but there’s no information provided about her being alive at noon’.
As cases like this show, that’s where the intelligence aspect of AI could be seen to be missing.
However, as a fairly blunt instrument, it has its uses, particularly if we think of it as an ideas generation tool. Say you want to write a blog for your website. You can ask ChatGPT to write the basics, and then finesse it in the editing.
Will it take our jobs?
In the very long term, probably, yes. That’s just the way the world is; some of the jobs we did 50 years ago, don’t exist anymore, it’s part of how the world has evolved. However, in our opinion it’s not going to happen any time soon.
We look at it like any other form of tech – take cloud computing, for instance. It’s been around for decades, but it’s only now that businesses are adopting it to its full potential, and a lot of that is only due to the pandemic.
At the moment, ChatGPT can’t replace human service providers. It’s not accurate enough and it still needs a lot of tinkering to make it create something worthwhile.
However, what it could do right now is increase productivity, by making people’s lives easier. It’s a great tool to speed things up and take away some of the heavy lifting, freeing up people’s time to be more creative or more focused.
Because, if you can automate an element of your workday, then it’s going to make your business more productive. In that respect, it’s the epitome of software and what software should be used for.