There’s a new AI robot in town: It’s called ChatGPT and you’d better pay attention, even if you aren’t into artificial intelligence. Big companies like Microsoft are pledging billions into this AI tool promising it will change the world. Read More to find all the good and bad ChatGPT offers
So What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is what they call an online generative chatbot program using the power of artificial intelligence software to quickly answer most any question you ask it. It was designed by a company called OpenAI and released in November of 2022. In less than a month this chatbot went viral and by January of this year it attracted more than 100 million users. For context, it took TikTok 9 months to get that many users. And so, to use it you go to their website, create an account and register then type into a text box and ask it countless questions. It responds to virtually any prompt you give it with startling speed and clarity. Whereas many chatbots only know how to respond to certain keywords or triggers, ChatGPT seems to be much more advanced and can respond to complex questions and spit out comprehensive, essay-length answers on virtually any topic. Often you’ll get an answer that’s incredibly useful, accurate and very detailed while other times the answer is totally wrong. Its hard to predict what you’ll get.
What Kind of Questions Can You Ask It?
Anything really. You can ask it to write you original music, poetry, or even create original pieces of art. It will even convert movies into emojis. People are using it to write their entire job applications and students are asking it to answer their school assignments and write their university papers posting their A+ AI created research papers for everyone to see on s. One trending social media image or meme created by ChatGPT is of a Koala dunking a basketball Micheal Jordan style. It’s so realistic you’d swear it will an image someone took.
So, ChatGPT’s expertise is broad, and its ability to follow a conversation is notable. When I asked it for words that rhymed with “purple,” it offered a few suggestions, then when I followed up “How about with pink?” it didn’t miss a beat.
Be that as it may, another person on twitter used it to create a funny Valentine’s greeting card for their husband making it sound the way a pirate would talk but….. based on the language and word choice used you’d think it was written by a Newfoundlander for a Newfoundlander. So, maybe not so accurate sometimes.
How Reliable Is This Digital AI?
It can be scary accurate for one question and way off for another. For instance, it scored 70% on the US Medical Licensing Examination, 70% on a bar exam for lawyers. Several high school teachers have tweeted that ChatGPT already writes better than most of their students and so many educators are torn between admiring ChatGPT’s potential usefulness and fearing its harm to human learning.
The big quote that comes to my mind is : be careful because with great power comes great responsibility.
What Are Some Concerns?
1. It isn’t aways right:
Just like the internet, truth and facts are not always a given and ChatGPT is guilty of getting it wrong. It fails frequently at basic math, can’t seem to answer simple logic questions, and will even go as far as to argue completely incorrect facts. ChatGPT arrives at an answer by making a series of guesses, which is part of the reason it can argue wrong answers as if they were completely true.
2. Thre is Bias Baked Into the System: biased behavior
ChatGPT was trained on the collective writing of humans across the world, past and present. This means that the same biases that exist in the data, can also appear in the model. In fact, users have shown that this AI can produce some terrible answers, some, for example, that discriminate against women while others are extremely harmful to a range of minority groups. A similar AI chatbot called Sparrow (owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet) was released in September 2022. However, it was kept behind closed doors because of similar concerns that it could cause harm.
3. Its Definetly A Challenge to Education.
You can ask ChatGPT to proofread your writing or point out how to improve a paragraph. Alternatively, you can remove yourself from the equation entirely and ask ChatGPT to write something for you.
Teachers have experimented with feeding English assignments to ChatGPT and like I”ve said before, have received answers that are far better than what many of their students could do. From writing cover letters to describing major themes in a famous work of literature, ChatGPT can do it without hesitating.
As a teacher myself, it begs the question: if ChatGPT can write and think for us, will students need to learn to write in the future?
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