Sometimes a source of concern and fear, sometimes a source of hope, artificial intelligence generally leaves no one indifferent. In recent weeks, one of them has attracted all eyes on: ChatGPT.
If you’ve ever used a voice assistant like Siri or Alexa, you’ve already had a taste of what ChatGPT looks like. But unlike those voice assistants, ChatGPT is a real-time conversation tool that allows you to converse with it as if you were talking to a friend.
The AI platform has grabbed gazillions of eyeballs, with people trying out the new label worldwide. Not only this, but the innovation has successfully entered the list of tech companies loved by the tech giant Microsoft. The news suggests that the company is all set to invest billions of dollars in the OpenAI GPT 3 chatbot.
While this is an achievement for the AI market and investors. On the other hand, it is eye-opening to see how AI is transforming the world and taking over human capabilities.
What is ChatGPT:
ChatGPT has been a hit since its launch at the very end of November 2022. In less than a week, the platform already had more than a million registrations and hundreds of screenshots of conversations have gone viral on Twitter. Users have had a great time testing the tool, pushing it to its limits (which we will analyze a little further in this article), often showing great inventiveness and being surprised by the great power of this new tool.
ChatGPT, short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a natural language processing (NLP) technology that enables machines to understand and respond to human language. Developed by the American company OpenAI, it is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) system that utilizes deep learning algorithms to generate human-like conversations in natural language. In short, it is a form of text-based interaction between machines and humans.
It is based on the Transformer model and uses large amounts of data to build a deep learning model that can understand and respond to natural language.
The model was trained using text databases from the internet. This included a whopping 570GB of data obtained from books, webtexts, articles,… present on the internet. To be even more exact, 300 billion words were fed into the system.
The platform is specifically designed to understand and generate natural language. This makes it different from many other chatbots, often designed to provide pre-determined responses to specific inputs or perform specific tasks. Its ability to remember the previous questions you asked and respond differently makes it stand out from all the other chatbots out there. The answers are also less “conversational” compared to those given by a more classical chatbot.
Although the web interface is in English, ChatGPT understands and responds in several languages including French, German, Russian and Japanese.
Advantages of ChatGPT:
Natural Language Generation: ChatGPT can generate natural language responses that are often indistinguishable from those of a human being. This is particularly useful when automated responses are required, such as in customer service or chatbot applications.
Language Translation: ChatGPT can be used for language translation tasks to generate accurate translations between multiple languages.
Content Creation: ChatGPT can generate creative and original content, such as poetry or short stories, making it a valuable tool for writers and content creators.
Disadvantages of ChatGPT:
Biases: Like all machine learning models, ChatGPT can suffer from biases in its training data, resulting in biased or offensive responses.
Overreliance on Data: ChatGPT requires a large amount of training data to function correctly and may need to perform better in situations with limited data.
Limited Understanding: ChatGPT may not understand the context or meaning behind specific phrases or words, leading to inaccurate or inappropriate responses.
The debate around ChatGPT:
One of the primary debates around ChatGPT is its potential to replace human writers and content creators. Some argue that the technology will lead to a loss of jobs in the creative industry, while others argue that it will free up time for writers to focus on more complex and original work.
Another concern is the potential misuse of the technology, particularly in creating deep fakes or spreading disinformation. This has led to calls for increased regulation and ethical guidelines for the use of language models like ChatGPT.
Google launching its rival chatbot:
After witnessing the popularity Chat GPT has attained and, as such, considering it a threat, Google, one of the largest tech companies in the world, and other tech giants have also announced plans to launch a chatbot, further fueling the debate around the use of AI. The company’s chatbot, which is expected to be launched soon, will be powered by the latest advances in AI, including machine learning and natural language processing. This has raised questions about the level of trust that people will have in AI-powered systems and whether they will be willing to rely on AI for essential tasks, such as answering customer queries or making medical diagnoses.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has also weighed in on the debate around AI. He has called it “Scary Good.”Musk has since past been a vocal critic of AI and warned about unchecked AI development’s potential dangers. He has called for regulation of AI to ensure that it is used responsibly and safely and stated that AI could be the greatest threat to humanity if it is not regulated correctly.
Will ChatGPT change the concept of creative writing?
Another reason why ChatGPT is trending is because of its potential to replace human jobs in various industries, such as journalism and customer service. People can train the model to perform tasks previously done by humans and can do so at a much faster pace and with fewer errors. This has raised concerns about AI’s impact on employment and whether people can find new jobs as AI advances.
ChatGPT has already significantly impacted the creative writing industry, with many writers and content creators using the technology to generate new ideas or supplement their work. However, it is somewhat unlikely that ChatGPT will completely replace human creativity, as it is still limited by its training data and lack of proper understanding of human emotions and experiences. Instead, it is more likely to be used as a tool to enhance and augment the work of human writers and content creators.
High tension
Right now, the European Union is the centre for discussions on regulation of these new bots _ its AI Act has been grinding through the corridors of power for many months and could be finalised this year.
But the GDPR already obliges firms to justify the way they handle data, and AI models are very much on the radar of Europe’s regulators.
“We have seen that ChatGPT can be used to create very convincing phishing messages,” Bertrand Pailhes, who runs a dedicated AI team at France’s data regulator Cnil, said.
He said generative AI was not necessarily a huge risk, but Cnil was already looking at potential problems including how AI models used personal data.
“At some point we will see high tension between the GDPR and generative AI models,” German lawyer Dennis Hillemann, an expert in the field, said.
The latest chatbots, he said, were completely different from the kind of AI algorithms that suggest videos on TikTok or search terms on Google.
“The AI that was created by Google, for example, already has a specific use case _ completing your search,” he said.
But with generative AI the user can shape the whole purpose of the bot. “I can say, for example: act as a lawyer or an educator. Or if I’m clever enough to bypass all the safeguards in ChatGPT, I could say: `Act as a terrorist and make a plan’,” he said.
OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4, is scheduled for release soon and is rumoured to be so good that it will be impossible to distinguish from a human.
To conclude:
In closing, here is a final line of thought. Artificial intelligence is fine, but what kind of intelligence are we talking about here?
It is legitimate to be enthusiastic about this new technologies, but it is important to take a step back from it and to question how it works in order to get the best out of it and keep a critical eye.
GPT is an intelligent machine, but in the sense of an intelligence that mobilizes knowledge, itself reduced to language sets. The intelligence here is therefore an intelligence that analyzes signs, words and combines them based on statistical regularities.
Nevertheless, as we all know, this intelligence can not be reduced to this art of mathematical combination. Intelligences are multiple : There is an intelligence of sensitivity, an intelligence of intuition, a moral intelligence,… We mobilize these in turn when we make judgments, when we express intentions, convictions, feelings,… All these judgments, GPT is not able to write them down. It is therefore important to understand that our intelligence is not only a matter of calculations, but also of subjective singularity. This allows us to question ourselves, to be critical, to grasp the particular reasoning of an emotion.
We have thus entered a new area, that of a dialogue between an artificial intelligence on the one hand and on the other hand, ourselves, multiple and lived intelligences. For the moment, AI’s remain tools that can be used to increase productivity and even creativity but will never replace the work of the human being endowed with sensitivity and multiple intelligences.
Critical thinking is thus vital with the rise of generative AI. The best advice we can give is to try out and explore these technologies, and to stay conscious of their limitations. Tread carefully when it comes to bias, data privacy, and the objectives of the creators.
