The webs have been buzzing with the new shiny technology, ChatGPT – it managed to create even more noise than its previous version, GPT-3.
Both are large language models (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) developed by OpenAI and have been trained on massive text datasets, which allows them to generate human-like text in a wide range of styles and formats. Perhaps you played yourself with ChatGPT’s text prompt, and surely you must have been surprised by the width of tasks and styles it can handle: write a haiku, a latin phrase, some code, or just answer some questions you would look up on Wikipedia. The possibilities may seem endless and, in many cases, you may get the impression you are interacting with another human.
However, it is important to note that ChatGPT is not a conscious being and does not have the ability to think, feel, or perceive the world in the way that humans do. It operates solely based on the patterns and information it has learned from its training data. That’s why some experts call it a stochastic parrot – it has extraordinary memory for storing knowledge and an extended attention span, but limited capabilities to understand cause and effect relations.
While ChatGPT can generate new text that has not been seen before, this is done by recombining patterns and information it has learned from its training data, rather than through creative thought. It can generate new sentences, paragraphs, and even entire articles that are coherent and grammatically correct, but it does not have the ability to come up with truly original ideas or concepts.
However, ChatGPT can be useful in certain applications such as writing, translation, and summarization, where it can save time and effort. Additionally, it can be used to generate new content in the form of text, it can be used to generate creative writing, poetry, song lyrics and storytelling, when combined with human creativity and curation. It could also be used for various other applications such as chatbot or virtual assistants, semi-AI-generated blog posts like this one, and other business-related tasks.
The blog’s preview picture was generated by ChatGPT’s designer cousin DALL-E 2, when given the task to paint an “Escher painting of a tractor plowing fields of numeric data”.