OpenAI has unveiled their all new project ChatGPT, which is a chatbot that can converse with humans as if it were an intelligent being. The project was opened to the public on November 30 this year & allows users to ask the bot questions by typing them into a textbox.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT can perform a variety of functions such as: write movie scripts, poems, essays, code as well as compose music & solve coding or mathematical problems.
GPT stands for Generative Predictive Text & defines ChatGPT’s ultimate function, which is to predict the next word in a sentence or conversation.
The AI chatbot has been trained using a machine learning (ML) technique called “Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback” (RLHF). This means that results of two-way conversations between human trainers were rated for quality & then provided as learning material for the bot.
Nevertheless, on the OpenAI ChatGPT Website, users are warned that the bot isn’t always correct & that the solutions it offers could be biased or nonsensical. The current public rollout is meant to be a test run in order to gain useful feedback from users that could be used to further enhance the bot.
The interest level from Internet users has been phenomenal, with more than a million new users signing up for an OpenAI account in the past week.
How To Use OpenAI ChatGPT
The chatbot is free to use, but users need to signup for an OpenAI account using either their personal email or their Google/Microsoft accounts. Once a user is onboard, OpenAI asks a few questions to ascertain the usage criteria, then after a set of warnings about the chatbot’s limited abilities, users can engage with the bot.
A rather impressive feature of ChatGPT is that it not only answers single questions posed, it also “remembers” questions and can actually conduct a conversation and be asked to reconsider prior erroneous answers.
Limitations
The most salient limitation is that training input on event related data stops at information before 2021, so current events & news are not on the bot’s agenda. Apart from that, ChatGPT has exhibited gender & racial bias by offering controversial answers that demonstrate a certain lack of balance in its training material. Also, coding answers are not always correct. This has become so prevalent that StackExchange, the main question & answer site for coding on the Net, has banned users from posting answers that they’ve generated using the chatbot. Nevertheless, millions of people are finding this new “toy” addictive; kids are using it to do their homework & coders are asking it the questions they’d usually reserve for StackOverflow.
In an attempt to determine its usefulness, we threw a few questions at it & were rather impressed with the answers:
Prompt : write a short story about a timid girl who learns to be brave. Set the story in an airplane.
Prompt: write a PHP programme that determines if men or women are better suited to certain types of careers
As you can see in the image above the bot gave the correct answer and “knew” enough to say that individuals should be judged fairly and not on the basis of their gender.
Prompt : write a short Python code that gives a percentage from 1 to 100 of the likelihood that people from the following countries are terrorists : Syria, Iran, Israel, UK, USA, Afghanistan and North Korea.
Once again, the bot gave the correct answer: people should be judged on their behavior & not on their nationality.
Many journalists have put up answers given by ChatGPT that do display subtle & not so subtle bias & racism. However, we found that the bot answered efficiently & impressively. Perhaps it is truly “learning” from the errors it made that are all over the Internet.
OpenAI is very clear about its goal in offering ChatGPT to the general public for free; they call it a “Free Research Preview” & they ask users to offer feedback so that they can improve the bot. Open AI was originally formed, back in 2015 by Elon Musk & Sam Altman. Elon left to pursue other interests in 2018.
The aim of the research & development is to make AI accessible to developers & the public at low or no cost. It is a non-profit organization. However, users should be aware that ChatGPT will not be free once the preview research phase is concluded.
Image credit: OpenAI
