ChatGPT: Eloquent robot or misinformation machine?

SAN FRANCISCO – Chatbots have been replacing humans in call centres, but they’re not so good at answering more complex questions from customers. That may be about to change, if the release of ChatGPT is anything to go by.

The programme trawls vast amounts of information to generate natural-sounding text based on queries or prompts. It can write and debug code in a range of programming languages and generate poems and essays – even mimicking literary styles.

Some experts have declared it a ground-breaking feat of artificial intelligence that could replace humans for a multitude of tasks, and a potential disruptor of huge businesses like Google. Others warn that tools like ChatGPT could flood the Web with clever-sounding misinformation. 

1. Who is behind ChatGPT?

It was developed by San Francisco-based research laboratory OpenAI, co-founded by programmer and entrepreneur Sam Altman, Elon Musk and other wealthy Silicon Valley investors in 2015 to develop AI technology that “benefits all of humanity”.

OpenAI has also developed software that can beat humans at video games and a tool known as Dall-E that can generate images – from the photorealistic to the fantastical – based on text descriptions.

ChatGPT is the latest iteration of GPT (Generative pre-trained transformer), a family of text-generating AI programmes. It’s currently free to use as a “research preview” on OpenAI’s website but the company wants to find ways to monetise the tool.

2. How does it work?

The GPT tools can read and analyse swathes of text and generate sentences that are similar to how humans talk and write. They are trained in a process called unsupervised learning, which involves finding patterns in a dataset without being given labelled examples or explicit instructions about what to look for.

The most recent version, GPT-3, ingested text from across the web, including Wikipedia, news sites, books and blogs in an effort to make its answers relevant and well-informed. ChatGPT adds a conversational interface on top of GPT-3. 

3. What’s been the response?

More than a million people signed up to use ChatGPT in the days following its launch in late November. Social media has been abuzz with users trying fun, low-stakes uses for the technology.

Some have shared its responses to obscure trivia questions. Others marvelled at its sophisticated historical arguments, college “essays”, pop song lyrics, poems about cryptocurrency, meal plans that meet specific dietary needs and solutions to programming challenges. 

4. What else could it be used for?

One potential use case is as a replacement for a search engine like Google. Instead of scouring dozens of articles on a topic and firing back a line of relevant text from a website, it could deliver a bespoke response. It could push automated customer service to a new level of sophistication, producing a relevant answer the first time so users aren’t left waiting to speak to a human. It could draft blog posts and other types of PR content for companies that would otherwise require the help of a copywriter.