When introduced to the public last November, ChatGPT's ability to sound remarkably human drove Twitter into a frenzy. Users saw it write college-level essays and text-based Harry Potter games, work on code, and explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty. Within five days, more than a million people had signed up on OpenAI to try it out.
It's widely considered to be the best AI chatbot ever released to the public. And, like with any industrial revolution, ChatGPT has raised questions about whether or not technology could replace humans - as it seems to be strikingly good at doing what, only a little while ago, needed humans (and preferably those with a high-level education). The New York Times’ Peter Coy summed up working with ChatGPT into two options: either you do a better job than it, or you figure out how to make it work for you. If you can’t do either, you probably should find a different job. Although this sounds a little extreme, it's not necessarily surprising.
But ChatGPT is not, by any means, perfect. It isn’t constantly updating, so it’s confined to only using information from before 2021. If you ask it to write about something that’s constantly changing, such as the current British Prime Minister, it will start off with a sentence explaining how it “doesn’t have the capability” to know who the current PM is. It’s essentially just combining a bunch of information that’s already available on the internet and it treats every problem as an information problem. For example, if you ask it a math question using numbers it has never seen before, ChatGPT is unlikely to get it right because it's not smart enough to learn math skills simply based on examples from the internet. It won’t give an opinion on anything, but rather a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of both sides and an ending along the lines of “it depends on personal preferences”.
So, if you are working with ChatGPT, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of its capabilities and limitations. By using it effectively, you can automate routine tasks, generate reports, or even write articles. On the other hand, if you try to use ChatGPT for tasks that are beyond its capabilities, the results might not be accurate or satisfactory. Therefore, it is important to have a good strategy for integrating ChatGPT into your workflow, so that you can maximize its benefits and minimize its limitations.
Nevertheless, this chatbot has revolutionized the process of writing. If you don’t believe me, go back and try to figure out which paragraph wasn’t written by a human. As a writer, I really hope you can.
Published in the February 2023 issue of the Whitney Young Beacon.
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