OpenAI ChatGPT: The Future is Here and Scary

Written and originally published in 2023

Late in November 2022, OpenAI released a new product, OpenAI ChatGPT, that some say may make Google obsolete in a few years.

It’s a chatbot on steroids; it writes code, it writes essays, it corrects itself, and it does homework. It may even write research papers.

It’s a playground for anyone interested in how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) work to see for themselves the power of harnessing, training, and modeling data to do whatever you want it to do.

It’s so powerful that it’s almost scary.

In this post, I describe my own experience with OpenAI ChatGPT.

What is OpenAI ChatGPT?

It is an AI-trained model called ChatGPT that interacts with users in a conversational way. It uses a dialogue prompt format to answer questions that you have.

The official description on the website notes that it can “follow up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”

In subsequent posts, and after I have tried as many functionalities and use cases as possible, I will describe how the follow-up questioning works.

Since its release, more than 1 million users have created accounts and started interacting with ChatGPT. You, too, can create an account here.

It’s free to sign up with Open AI ChatGPT.

To illustrate the power of ChatGPT, I asked, “How can Artificial intelligence help world hunger? Here is its response.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help address world hunger in several ways. For example, AI can be used to:

Improve agricultural productivity and efficiency through the use of advanced sensors, drones, and other technologies that can monitor and optimize crop growth and soil health.

Develop more effective and sustainable farming methods, such as precision agriculture, which uses data and AI to optimize water, fertilizer, and other inputs to maximize yields and minimize environmental impact.

Enhance food distribution and logistics, by using AI to optimize routes, reduce waste, and ensure that food is delivered to those who need it in a timely and efficient manner.

Predict and respond to food shortages and other crises, by using AI to analyze data on weather, crop yields, and other factors to identify potential problems and develop solutions.

Overall, AI has the potential to play a significant role in helping to address world hunger, but it is important to use it in a responsible and ethical manner, and to ensure that it is integrated with other approaches and solutions.

Use Cases of OpenAI- ChatGPT

There are many use cases for ChatGPT examples. Some are using it to write programming code (in many languages including C, C++), homework assignment, poems, recipes, your profile, ASCII art. The list is endless for how to use ChatGPT.  

Obsolescence of Other Applications

Because of the speed at which users interact and the ease at which ChatGPT provides answers to questions, some Q&A websites like Stack Overflow have banned their users from sharing ChatGPT-generated responses on their sites.

This begs the question about the survivability or longevity of Q&A websites like Stack Overflow.

What OpenAI ChatGPT Cannot do

Because it is a text-based AI assistant, it cannot display graphical or visual content. For example, if you ask ChatGPT to draw an image, it cannot. Instead, it can render some art using ASCII format. For example, you can ask: “Can you display a simple ASCII art of a lion?”

Caution OpenAI ChatGPT

Since ChatGPT is still in its beta stage, it possible that there are still errors in its responses. The information on their website notes this

“While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice”.

In addition, users should be a bit careful in the type of content they share or ask ChatGPT. The company collects this data and uses it to further test the application.

Another caution for users using AI assistance generated responses from OpenAI ChatGPT or DALL·E 2 to write content or research studies is this: add attribution when using the generated content. This is in the usage policy.

This is partly because the content it generates may not always be correct, so by citing or attributing the content to ChatGPT, you may lessen the damage to your reputation for posting incorrect content.

Conclusion

If you’re anything like me, you can’t wait to go back to the ChatGPT playground to see what else it can or cannot do. At least for now, that’s what I’m going to do in my spare time until it wears off, becomes commonplace, or ChatGPT is disabled for one reason or another (like the Microsoft ChatBot years ago).