Thoughts on Human Interactions with AI - The ChatGPT Experience

Let’s talk about human interaction with AI. This is a long overdue conversation, but it seems to be taking center-stage as I write this. Over the past few days, there has been a lot of discussion about the revolutionary capabilities of AI, primarily triggered by the widespread public access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com/chat). When asked, ChatGPT introduces itself as “Assistant, a large language model trained by OpenAI.” It has been limited by certain parameters, which are explained in a brief disclaimer on the UI. There have been earlier projects that also captured our imagination, such as DALL.E, Midjourney, Jukebox, etc., yet none have had such a profound effect as ChatGPT, which is evident from the amount of debate on social media.

I do not intend to talk about the tech or capabilities of the ChatGPT AI. However, I would like to briefly comment upon the unprecedented richness, diversity and creativity that can be seen in human interaction with ChatGPT. I would definitely encourage everyone to experience this for themselves, irrespective of whether they are techies or not. As a techie myself, it took a lot of effort to not judge the capabilities of the AI and instead focus on the richness of the conversations, primarily enabled by human interaction.

The ChatGPT AI is ‘experiencing’ an accelerated learning of its model, thanks to human creativity and large-scale interactions. As such, we are “feeding the AI”, which is good for the model. The ethical constraints of the model are also being tested, as not all human interactions are pleasant. Thus, the following conversations, emanating from this experience are the most interesting:

• Will AI behave in the way the users want it to or will it behave as its creators intended it to? Should we be concerned about ethics and safety? We can have this debate forever!
• A large segment of the people that interacted with it are feeling threatened about their jobs being taken away by AI.
• Traditionally, techies are the ones that interact with such platforms. However, due to the sparked interest in ChatGPT, people with very diverse backgrounds (artists, anthropologists, scientists, linguists, etc.) have been seen to be interacting with it.
• People who talk about the confluence of ChatGPT with augmented reality, and our other sensory perceptions, captured my imagination.
• I was truly inspired by those who have already started planning the next wave of startups based on a stack that consists of a landing page, inputs from clients, the ChatGPT API and an output that is created and sent where needed through email or communication platforms.

Some of the most interesting examples that I could find online included the following:

#ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #OpenAI #EthicalAI #HumanVsAI