A Coaching Experiment with ChatGPT

Many posts I saw refer to being ?blown“ by the new ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI. So of course I was curious to check out it's capabilities from the perspective of a coach and tech enthusiast.?So let's see why this new chatbot from OpenAI is leaving so many in awe, fear, stunts and even attempts to circumvent its guardrails.

What is this ChatGPT exactly??

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot in beta, which is based on the GPT-3.5 language model released by Open AI?in November 2022.?The GPT-3.5 language model uses deep learning to generate human-like text and is the latest update of the GPT-3 AI model that demonstrated already in May 2020 that AI can write convincingly, but of course not perfectly, like a human. Trained by AI and machine learning, the Chat GPT system is designed to provide information and answer questions through a conversational interface. The AI is trained on a huge sample of text taken from the internet.

Looking at the ChatGPT feature you can already get a good feeling about what this chatbot is set out to do: finding answers, writing text or code, translating, summarizing text and keyword detection, classifying text, making recommendations based on text and explaining what anything does.?

"The system is an early demo of what’s possible. Soon you will be able to have helpful assistants that talk to you, answer questions, and give advice. Later you can have something that goes off and does tasks for you. Eventually you can have something that goes off and discovers new knowledge for you.” (Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO)

You can propably already see where the limitations of chatbots are especially looking at it from a coaching perspective???.

But with GPT-4 rumored to be coming sometime between Dec - Feb the parameters used will grow from 175 billion parameters for GPT-3 to supposedly more than 100 trillion parameters. So this will be something I don't want to miss out on.

Current limitations of ChatGPT

As ChatGPT's knowledge is only based on data sets and information before 2021 and only based on unqualified data sets from the internet, information can be outdated and answers can be biased.

ChatGPT can also give entirely wrong answers and present misinformation as fact, writing “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers”.

ChatGPT is not creative - it only picks up intents and combines information already known in a context of beautifully written dialogues.

ChatGPT reminds you frequently that it is not a human and in my case below refers me to different type of help and support possibilities to find someone to talk to. (If properly trained this could of course also be a coach ;).

GPT has rule sets programmed into the system (which some have already mastered to surpass though). It was trained to decline inappropriate requests such as:

• Having a political opinion
• Asking for violent or illegal behavior instructions.
• Anything bigoted.

Here an example of how it looks like hitting that wall with of course a very controversial topic specifically for a US based company:

Will ChatGPT replace humans as coaches?

So now to experimenting with the brilliant ChatGPT model itself and I thought: "Why not directly ask it, if it will replace humans as coaches?" The question we get asked most ???.

Here is the answer I got from ChatGPT:

Ok, you have to admit that is quite an amazing answer from an AI chatbot, but let's get to the language model itself and use it for a coaching related conversations to see what it can do:

Wow, that is quite a good and empathetic start I think. Let's take on the invite and explore this further...

Ok, here we go already, as you can see the algorithm is trained on providing information and giving advice... Not really to coach and ask questions to further explore and reflect on a situation. But it does feel like a good friend and mentor answering in a very profound way, picking up my frustration before and taking it further. And it is beautifully written in a very human-like way!

One has to see the beauty in this algorithm!

My Key Takeaways on ChatGPT

1. It can identify my intents, recognize metaphors and take on a basic conversation really well.
2. It can make you feel listened too, and that's sometimes already very helpful.
3. It is trained to provide answers, advice and information, so therefore great to get some first ideas on where to find help in difficult situations.
4. It does bear a lot of potential still due to it's human-like way of generating natural language outputs and I am more than curious to see where this AI chatbot road is taking us.
5. If offers a lot of possibilities to use for your client coachee interactions such as identifying areas of improvement analyzing communication styles and generating personalized strategies to go through with the coachee during a session.

Experiment for yourself and let me know your thoughts and findings!

Chat to you soon ??

Rebecca

How to get started?

Simply go to https://chat.openai.com/ signup and get started (you might have to wait for a bit as the system is quite overloaded at times).