Please, not another blog about how wonderful chatGPT is

Don't worry; this is not that kind of blog.?

ChatGPT has shown impressive human-like ability related to intellectual tasks such as deduction, abstraction, inference, and generalization. Its simple interface based on natural language has attracted users from all sectors of our society. To those who use it, the critical skill is creating "proper prompts." In recent months, thousands of eager users have learned that it is much better to provide ChatGTP a prompt with contexts, a single main topic, the right level of specificity, and examples, among other best practices.?

Consider these two prompts:?

1. Tell me how to feel better about myself
2. I want you to act as my friend. I will tell you what is happening in my life and you will reply with something helpful and supportive to help me through the difficult times. Do not write any explanations, just reply with advice/supportive words. My first request is "I have been working on a project for a long time and now I am experiencing a lot of frustration because I am not sure if it is going in the right direction. Please help me stay positive and focus on the important things (taken from https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts).

The responses to both prompts are wildly different. Consequently, a vast number of materials are devoted to improving the creation of prompts.?

The critical ability of ChatGPT is to predict what text should come next in any given sentence. ChatGPT creates strings of words that will best answer your prompt. The system calculates what should be the next element in the sequence, then estimates what would be the next element in the original series plus the recently calculated element; this loop continues until an exit condition is met.?

Among the several techniques that support ChatGPT, there is embedding, which maps words onto a space of relationships based on the probability of a given pair of tokens emerging together in a text. Within this ample space of relationships, it is possible to identify well-constructed meaningful phrases as distinguishable trajectories.?

Training a model such as ChatGPT is cumbersome: GPT is refined by a considerable amount of human feedback, following the principles of Reinforcement Learning (RL), that is, providing positive reinforcement to the best answers and punishing those that do not meet the expected quality. The involvement of humans is relevant to projects that want to create Large Language Models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, as the budget must consider the intervention of trained people able to provide the correct feedback to the model.?

Let's get to the point and ask ourselves: will there be a robust increase in general cognitive performance due to the introduction of technologies such as ChatGPT?

Before answering this question, I would like to talk about the research of Sugimoto et al. 2022. This work concludes that using a smartphone map impaired spatial learning and knowledge acquisition; in this study, people who used a paper map learned the routes of the experiment better. How often do you use Google Maps or Waze to reach your destination? I'm pretty sure that your answer is 'always.' According to this study, the opportunity to develop your spatial intelligence has been reduced.?

What should raise some concern is that the cognitive ability of writing is much more complex than spatial intelligence. For Pulungan (2016), writing involves three stages: (a) pre-writing, finding ideas, making a draft and notes; (b) writing, focusing on ideas, language, grammar, paragraph structure, organizing the content, composing and connecting ideas, syntactic structures, lexical items, and (c) After-writing, evaluating, revising, and reviewing.?

Each one of these activities is highly complex. What would be the cognitive effect of being a ChatGTP frequent consumer? Can it be argued that these users will ruin their ability to write? For Lysaker (2018), writing informs how thought develops, and, during an interview in 2002, David McCullough stated, "Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard".??

What would be the effect on young minds no longer exposed to the complexities of writing? Will the use of ChatGPT impair healthy cognitive development?

There is another point that I want to stress: ChatGPT is not a creator of new ideas; it is limited to the universe of data used to train it. Every Ph.D. candidate knows that, to get the degree, s/he has to significantly contribute to knowledge. ChatGPT is excellent for repeating old ideas, finding existing patterns, and expressing them as text, but it cannot create new things. It is superb to synthesize ideas, but it still needs to be trained by the creations of humans. You cannot get a doctoral degree using ChatGPT.?

I expect a massive reduction in the ability to write for a significant portion of the population, but we will still need researchers and creators.?

I take immense pleasure in writing; it is one of the things I enjoy the most. Will I leverage ChatGPT to help me create a scene in my next screenplay? I don't think so. Will I use ChatGPT to jump-start the creation of a new article? Maybe… did I use ChatGPT to create this article?

What do you think???

References

Lysaker, John T. (2018) Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought. University of Chicago Press. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226569734.001.0001.

Sugimoto, M., Kusumi, T., Nagata, N., & Ishikawa, T. (2022) Online mobile map effect: how smartphone map use impairs spatial memory, Spatial Cognition & Computation, 22:1-2, 161-183, DOI: 10.1080/13875868.2021.1969401

Pulungan, A. (2016) The cognitive process of writing in English: developing a cognitive based learning model. Proceedings of the 1st English Education International Conference (EEIC)?