What do you think about ChatGPT?

You already got that question, a lot lately. It is not usual that so many coworkers have been interested in new technology, you are used to be a source of news. But now daily papers and even morning television are talking about ChatGPT, making it hard for anyone to avoid this new technology. So now your manager/CEO is asking you, even she has picked up the news. What should you answer??

As a person with knowledge of technology, but not in machine learning (ML), it has been hard to summarise all things you have been reading about ChatGPT. There has been a lot of people raving about how good it is, even claiming it to be intelligent (really?). On the other hand, a lot of other people has been proving how bad ChatGPT is for some tasks.?

And now some tech-savvy person in your organisation has published a text generated by ChatGPT on your company slack, and many people in the organisation has been cheering.?

And you want your organisation forward, adopting new technology, maybe you could get your manager/CEO to allocate some funding for a project next year?

But here is something in your base knowledge that reacts, is this technology ready to use by an organisation like ours, and for what exactly?

First, you know that ChatGPT is a service developed by a company called OpenAI. The service is in public Beta, meaning anyone can access it, but it is not a release service with support. Not really something you want to adopt in your organisation, what will it cost when released?

The service is based on another OpenAI service, GPT-3. You tested GPT-3, by using their API’s, so you know the capabilities of that service. ChatGPT has a newer model, called GPT-3.5 containing training data until October 2021, so you still need to manage newer data in some way. And we did not get this working with GPT-3, why should it work now?

The chat-functionality added as a layer above GPT-3 is good. It generates text that are grammatically correct, and mostly related to the context. But as there is no fact checking and limited bias filters the responses might not be something useful.

And even when the service is used to generate code (as done with GPT-3), it has been showed that the generated code is not always working (at all or as expected).

But then you remember the studies you read, about how to use AI to augment humans instead of replacing them. You recall that productivity could increase, if the people used the AI as a creative partner. If ChatGPT is used to generate a customised boiler template for a person with a task of producing a text, or code, then it would kick-start their work. And they may also use ChatGPT to explore different options, just by adjusting the questions in the dialog.

When getting back to your manager/CEO (or proactively reaching out), you are position ChatGPT as a great technology to augment certain roles in your organisation, and you want to start initiatives with certain end-user groups to develop workflows that value is created for the users. At the same time as you want to start a project to ensure that the results from AI generated text are compliant with your policies around ethics and fairness, to build trust in the technology. The output from all this work is useful for the organisation even if you in the end select another service then ChatGPT, as you think the market for this kind of services will explode next year.

You also suggest that you start to arrange for a workshop with the leadership team, when they, in a safe environment and with support, can explore this technology by themselves and has the possibility to ask any questions they may have. Maybe the members in the leadership team want to use this service for summarise documents they need to read, or create storyboards for presentations they need to do??

You already think about who to bring to this workshop. You have been investing some time to build a network of skilled people around you, as no single person can know everything today. And for this workshop you have a person in your LinkedIn network you contact directly, you want to schedule a date now, when your manger/CEO is interested. So she could ?tell her peers about what a innovative organisation she has.