Eleven Hundred Agency

ChatGPT: Please create a title for this blog

By Michelle Edge

Move over crypto and NFTs, the newest tech phenom in town is ChatGPT. For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is a conversational chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. And it’s not only easy to use, it’s free for most people to use (for now). Well, at least it is when it’s not at capacity, but more on that later.

Think Google search, but on steroids. You just type out your question in everyday language, and ChatGPT answers back - but far more ‘humanly’ than any smart speaker or virtual assistant ever has.

What can ChatGPT do?

ChatGPT can generate programming code, write a poem or essay, or even explain blockchain in plain English. It can do all of this and more, in a conversation that starts to feel disturbingly like talking to a real person,

 It’s an exciting iteration of AI, but also a somewhat frightening one. My first experience with ChatGPT left me feeling more than a little ‘shook’. This AI is definitely smarter than the average bear, and it doesn’t just spit out encyclopedic answers. It analyses, processes and — remarkably — even seems to think. And because it’s built to learn and improve, who knows what its capabilities will look like even a year from now?

Why are people afraid of it?

Pundits are already warning that ChatGPT and other AI like it could change education forever. How can we know whether it was a student or an AI that wrote that Hamlet essay? In fact, the FT reports that a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton, one of the world’s top business schools, put ChatGPT to the test on an exam, and ChatGPT not only passed, it outperformed some of his students, earning a solid B to B- grade.

There are also fears that ChatGPT will cause job loss among white-collar workers, particularly if it continues to advance and can accomplish things that previously required a high level of education and skill to do. For now, it seems unlikely that ChatGPT is ready to replace humans in any particular job, but it does seem like AI will change how work gets done - particularly for those in text-heavy professions.

And then there’s the question of just how reliable this AI chatbot is. As ChatGPT itself disclaims, it “may occasionally generate incorrect information”, providing the caveat that it’s only as good as the data it was trained on and doesn’t have the ability to verify the information it generates. It also stipulates that it has “limited knowledge of [sic] world and events after 2021”, which certainly impacts its accuracy.

Should we use it or are we hastening the robot takeover?

Judging by the amount of traffic on the site – which often causes it to be inaccessible – fears aside, people are embracing ChatGPT.

It was actually one of my clients who convinced me to give ChatGPT a try. We talked about its capabilities and laughed about the fact that she and I both tend to say please and even thank you to AI. Turns out we’re not alone, with both colleagues and friends admitting they use niceties with AI chatbots and assistants.

Some do so out of habit, but more than one expressed the opinion that we ought to be polite to AI, so that when the robots come to enslave us all, we’ll be in their good graces.

No matter if you’re a friend or foe of ChatGPT, one thing is for certain. The AI genie is out of the bottle, and we will just have to wait and see where it takes us. And as for whether to be polite to our AI, I say better safe than sorry.

ChatGPT is the greatest, thanks so much!