Let’s talk about...ChatGPT

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, has become the most talked about piece of innovative technology since the iPhone. It has been assessed and analysed to exhaustion and filled thousands of pages of both online and paper publications. Perhaps most significantly, it has lit the spark of AI curiosity for those who were previously uninterested. It feels like everyone is talking about or using ChatGPT.

Why ChatGPT, why now?

The extent to which ChatGPT has captured the public imagination is a little unexpected, but it seems to be a case of the right technology at the right time.

Artificial neural networks, a type of AI that is able figure out relationships within datasets without relying on the input of specific code, have been around for a while. But it was the development of the transformer neural net by Google in 2017 that sparked the beginning of the recent revolution in generative AI and language. Transformers are able to mimic certain processes of the human brain and have supercharged AI language technology. They are an essential element of AI models like BART and the GPT family. They also help the functioning of your translation apps, smart assistants, predictive text and email spam filters, to name a few of the many applications.

GPT stands for ‘generative pretrained transformer’ which is important because it tells us that this model has the capacity to generate output and is trained on existing text data. This ‘training’ consists of absorbing language patterns and recognizing which words are associated with one another. Because the quantities of data involved are huge, it gives GPT a better knowledge of context in language than other previous types of AI.

What can ChatGPT do?

It’s a simple question but the short answer is that we’re still finding out.

ChatGPT is really good at responding swiftly to text prompts in natural-sounding human language. It understands multiple languages, has encyclopaedic knowledge (up to 2021) and recreates any style. You can ask it to compose pretty much any form of text, from a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare to a shopping list to a complex project management plan. It could help you draft an email, your resume, a social media post or even a novel. It can also write code and create Excel formulas.

Numerous plug-ins have now been developed for ChatGPT to increase its usefulness, including a recent feature to enable it to search the internet via Bing.

ChatGPT is radically altering the way we use technology and the internet.

Can ChatGPT translate?

Yes. To an extent.

Tests from reliable sources have arrived at similar conclusions. The language technology experts at CSA Research have looked at the question in detail. They conclude that ChatGPT produces ‘strikingly good results’ when the languages involved are served by large amounts of data for training (high resource) but that low-resource languages fair less well. This means that you stand more chance of

getting a usable translation if the languages involved are for example, English and German, as opposed to languages like Swahili or Hindi where there is less data available for training AI models.

CSA also found that ChatGPT was stronger than current machine translation for tasks involving ‘noisy’ data, (that is to say text that contains perhaps spelling errors or lots of colloquial and unusual language) and that it dealt better with defining context. Being able to use prompts to create more elaborate instructions for the system to work with was also seen as a plus point. The language industry commentator Slator, looked at recent studies by Tencent, Intento and Microsoft and reported that all three rated ChatGPT as ‘competitive’ for translation involving high resource languages. Language consultants Nimdzi found generative AI language models (like ChatGPT) to be ‘more fluent’ but ‘less accurate’ than current machine translation (MT). However Nimdzi also concluded that the potential applications of these AI models were much greater than traditional MT, particularly in areas such as, for example, transcreation or detecting gender bias.

ChatGPT sounds great, are there any drawbacks?

Unfortunately, yes. Impressive as it is, ChatGPT has significant flaws.

It has a tendency to invent responses that sound truthful and balanced but are in fact completely made up. These are commonly referred to as ‘hallucinations’. Often these inventions are simple to spot, especially if you know the facts yourself, but sometimes they sound realistic and you could easily be fooled.

ChatGPT is also affected by the problem of inherent bias in AI applications which has been well documented. Using the internet as a way to learn about the human world means that AI can also absorb the biases found there. Humans themselves have many prejudices, frequently unconscious, and these are often repeated in information on the world wide web. Cultural, gender and racial biases are all at risk of being copied by AI and ChatGPT is no exception. The creators of ChatGPT are fully aware of these limitations and have stated that they are actively working to resolve them. It’s worth noting that ChatGPT does have a much more robust safeguarding system than previous AI models and frequently refuses to provide an answer to queries on sensitive issues. There are also security concerns. ChatGPT has the potential to provide hackers and cyber criminals with their best tool yet. Where once phishing scams were relatively straightforward to spot with their poor grammar and clunky English, ChatGPT’s fluency of expression and often faultless spelling provide enhanced scamming prospects to lawbreakers.

And maybe think twice before feeding the chatbot with your precious company information. There is now some protection but there’s still a risk that your data could be shared further down the line.

ChatGPT is very useful but should be handled with care

It would be fair to say that ChatGPT is keeping the language industry on its toes, even though, for the moment its translation abilities are good but not good enough to trust it with translations that matter. If you need to translate important business texts, literature, targeted marketing copy or similar, human expertise is crucial. ChatGPT can be a helpful tool for tasks such as getting a quick understanding of a text in another language or for generating content ideas, but as yet its flaws are too significant to let it take on important translation work unsupervised.

What we do know for certain is that ChatGPT lacks the many wonderful qualities of a human professional linguist. It can’t replace their cultural understanding, including an acute grasp of humor,

idioms, dialect and other quirks of human communication. It also lacks their awareness of bias and accessibility and how to use equitable language. Judgment and empathy aren’t qualities it can claim to possess, nor does it have brand knowledge or business wisdom.

What it most certainly does not have is a sense of meaningful creativity born from a wealth of human experience.

We’re keeping an open mind

How big a role ChatGPT and similar AI systems will play is as yet uncertain. What we do know is that generative AI is changing the technology landscape and ignoring it is not an option. For now we hope the doom sayers are mistaken and that this incredible technology will have a positive impact on the world of language and the people who work in it. For those of us who play with words for a living, well, we’ll keep an open mind and continue to welcome technology tools when they make our lives easier and benefit our customers directly.