In November, the research company OpenAI released ChatGPT, which is an artificially intelligent chatbot system. For now the service is free and available to anyone with an OpenAI account, which only takes a minute or two to make. Right off the bat it was a hit. Within a few days of its launch it crossed over a million users. But, considering how there have been other chatbots around for the past few years, what makes this ChatGPT so special?
Pros
For years we have had chatbots on the internet, yet none were really able to reach the abilities of what ChatGPT was able to accomplish. ChatGPT was released with the main purpose of showing off the limitless possibilities of artificial intelligence. Just type in any prompt and it’ll give a relevant answer. For example, you can give it prompts about general topics like, “The American Revolution.” You can ask it to write a poem and even request that it be more exciting. ChatGPT gives a clear and concise answer to most questions and may sometimes give superior information than popular search engines such as Google or Bing. More often than not, the answer will be useful.
Downsides
There are still a few downsides, such as the fact that ChatGPT doesn’t know everything. All it does is track patterns throughout the internet and compile that into a summary for whatever prompt it is given. OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, warned that while the answers you get may sound plausible and even authoritative, but they might well be entirely wrong.
There’s also the fact of how such a software could lead to students cheating. According to an article from The Atlantic, Daniel Herman, an English teacher of 12 years, noted that ChatGPT writes better than the majority of high school students nowadays. Some have noted that it is similar to the calculator, which, rather than ruined math as a whole, only improved students’ work on mathematics.
Conclusion
The release of ChatGPT opens a new door into the future of artificial intelligence. Such a program exceeds the capabilities of its other chatbot successors. Despite it’s vast possibilities, though, ChatGPT is still in its early stages and has a long way to go. So will ChatGPT pave the way for new technologies, or will it just fade away as other previous tech hypes have?
