Try this chatbot
Welcome to Advisorator’s Tip of the Week, helping you learn something new from the tech world every Tuesday.
I’ve been trying to think of an approachable way to cover ChatGPT, the conversational AI tool that’s become one of the biggest stories in tech. Ultimately, my recommendation is that you just try it yourself.
Anyone can create a login on the ChatGPT website, type in a question or a writing prompt, and get a written response that’s shockingly, perhaps frighteningly human. The site also understands follow-up questions based on the context of the previous discussion.
For example, try asking the following three questions in order and see what comes out:
– Write an intro to a college essay on the long-term effects of globalization.
– That’s a little too academic-sounding. Can you rewrite in a more casual way?
– Great, now rewrite it again in the form of a poem.
(You can also click the image atop this section for the gripping and 100% true tale of a certain tech journalist’s meteoric rise and scandal-plagued downfall.)
Much has already been written about ChatGPT’s flaws, most notably its weak safeguards against racism and its tendency to lie with confidence. As an AI modeled after the human brain and trained on large amounts of text, it has a knack for understanding and reproducing natural language, but it’s not plugged into the broader internet and has no way to verify the accuracy of what it’s saying.
Still, people have already found some utility in its writing chops, and its ability to understand complex questions feels like a potential breakthrough in how we might someday interact with computers. Playing around with it is a worthy endeavor if only to get a sense of what’s coming—for better and for worse.
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