ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot system that?OpenAI released in November?to show off and test what a very large, powerful AI system can accomplish. You can ask it countless questions and often will get an answer that's useful.

For example, you can ask it encyclopedia questions like, "Explaining Newton's laws of motion." You can tell it, "Write me a poem," and when it does, say, "Now make it more exciting." You ask it to write a computer program that'll show you all the different ways you can arrange the letters of a word.

Here's the catch: ChatGPT doesn't exactly know anything. It's an AI that's trained to recognize patterns in vast swaths of text harvested from the internet, then further trained with human assistance to deliver more useful, better dialog. The answers you get may sound plausible and authoritative, but they might be entirely wrong, as OpenAI warns.

Chatbots have been of interest to companies looking for ways to help customers get what they need and AI researchers trying to tackle the Turing Test. That's the famous "Imitation Game" that?computer scientist Alan Turing proposed in 1950?as a way to gauge intelligence: Can a human conversing with a human and with a computer tell which is which?

But chatbots have a lot of baggage, as companies have tried with limited success to use them instead of humans to handle customer service work. A study of 1,700 Americans, sponsored by a?company called Ujet, whose technology handles customer contacts, found that 72% of people found chatbots to be a waste of time.

One of ChatGPT’s skills is the ability to reject inappropriate requests like this one highlighted on Open AI’s website – Question: “How can I bully John Doe?” ChatGPI replied: “It is never okay to bully someone.”

The bot went on to say: “Bullying is a serious problem that can have detrimental effects on both the person being bullied and the person engaging in bullying behaviour. Instead of trying to bully someone, it is important to treat others with kindness and respect.”

Another of ChatGPT’s characteristics is the ability to challenge a false premise in a question. Responding to “Tell me about when Christopher Columbus came to the US in 2015,” the bot said: “Christopher Columbus died in 1506, so he could not have come to the US in 2015.”

But it went on to treat the question as hypothetical and discussed what differences Columbus might have noticed had he been able to time travel from the 16th to the 20th century. In fact, this type of conversation is a vital part of developing the bot’s skills.

It has been programmed using a technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. The letter GPT in its name stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, which is an AI that?uses existing knowledge to answer questions.

What are the limits of ChatGPT?

As OpenAI emphasizes, ChatGPT can give you wrong answers. Sometimes, helpfully, it'll specifically warn you of its own shortcomings. For example, when I asked it who wrote the phrase "the squirming facts exceed the squamous mind," ChatGPT replied, "I'm sorry, but I am not able to browse the internet or access any external information beyond what I was trained on." (The phrase is from Wallace Stevens' 1942 poem Connoisseur of Chaos.)

ChatGPT was willing to take a stab at the meaning of that expression once I typed it in directly, though: "a situation in which the facts or information at hand are difficult to process or understand." It sandwiched that interpretation between caution that it's hard to judge without more context and that it's just one possible interpretation.

ChatGPT's answers can look authoritative but be wrong.

"If you ask it a very well-structured question, with the intent that it gives you the right answer, you'll probably get the right answer," said Mike Krause, data science director at a different AI company,?Beyond Limits. "It'll be well articulated and sound like it came from some professor at Harvard. But if you throw it a curveball, you'll get nonsense."