Samantha. This is the name of the artificial intelligence that Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with in the movie “Her”. He does precisely that because of his own solitude, but also because the software has been configured to be frighteningly human. Doesn't that sound familiar?
Just 10 years after the release of this very intriguing anticipation movie, Chat GPT showed up. OpenAI, a San Francisco-based AI company also responsible for tools like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, the breakthrough image generator that we talked about in our AI creativity post, has created this clever artificial intelligence program. It has the answer to absolutely everything and it has been configured and trained to interact in the most human way possible. It works so well that you would think you had a friend or relative at the end of the keyboard, except it’s a robot that has a sense of humor.
How was Chat GPT configured? What is it already able to do? How will it change the way we work? Here’s a portrait of an AI like no other.
Birth of a Humanoid AI
Leonardo da Vinci would have dreamed of it; San Francisco entrepreneurs have done it. They configured an artificial intelligence program capable of answering any question in a qualitative way in just a few seconds. ChatGPT, which stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer,” is the best AI chatbot ever released to the general public.
Feel like reading a set of 50 Haikus about the Sequoia National Park? Let's go. Want the software to invent the rules of a new board game? No problem. Fix a complex code bug? Sure. Write your best man’s speech for your friend's wedding? Believe it or not, it can do that too.
To successfully adapt to any situation, Chat GPT has scanned, absorbed, and analyzed hundreds of millions of texts. That is to say, it has processed almost every word published on the Internet from its creation to 2021. Did you think Wikipedia represented an infinite volume of data? It's only 0.6% of the database known by this AI.
In just 5 days after its release, more than a million people tried to query Chat GPT. Today, this AI is imposing itself at a lightning speed at work. To name just a few examples, it can write marketing texts, create code, write a sales pitch, help you negotiate a salary increase or even coach you to settle a conflict with a colleague.
For Alexis Grinbaum, Research Director, this software will find its place in the working world and change its uses. "Entire sectors of the workforce will evolve but not disappear”, he states. “There will always be lawyers and doctors and journalists, but the content of their jobs will change.” This means that Chat GPT is already shaking up the professional world.
Surprising Uses of Chat GPT
One Twitter user asked Chat GPT to "write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR”. But that's not all! It can also:
Write jokes: Tell me the difference between a balloon and an elephant.
“The difference between a balloon and an elephant is that you can inflate a balloon, but you can’t inflate an elephant just like that!"
Write 4 lines of the Hotel California song in the style of Shakespeare:
“In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
Upon a balmy eve, in days of yore,
The Eagles sang a tale, most tragic and mean,
Of a hotel, called California, forever more."
Solve the mystery: who came first? The chicken of the egg?
“The egg came first, it was just too chicken to admit it."
Imagine and describe a world with Elon Musk as our leader.
“If Elon Musk was the leader, the world would be a very interesting place! We'd all be living on Mars by now and probably have jetpacks for personal transportation. Traffic jams would be a thing of the past because we'd all be zooming around in our Teslas. And forget about power outages, we'd have solar panels on every roof! The only downside is that we'd all be working 120 hour weeks to pay for it all. But hey, at least we'd be saving the planet and colonizing Mars, so it's totally worth it, right?"
Surprising? It can also:
Find ideas for party themes or costumes
Write an essay
Ask for compliments
Write a resignation letter
Get relationship advice
Get advice on how to pitch ecology to your climatosceptic uncle Jamie and so much more.
How Far Will Chat GPT Go?
A series of articles would not be enough to list all the implications that GPT Chat could have on our society. This tool is already being described by some as a more powerful technology than Google. But will it flop or rock: who knows?
However, we’re sure that we will have to regulate the use of this very intelligent and fast learning AI quickly. In the United States, Chat GPT is already banned from schools and colleges, where professors have watched in amazement how the robot writes essays. This, in addition to the ethical problem that it poses if some students no longer do the work but are graded like the others, can have serious consequences on the intellectual capacities of those who instead of training to think, ask the AI to do it for them.
What about the law, where AI could be used by lawyers in trials, even though we don't know where and how it gets its information and law professors have noted that it makes mistakes? Or art, which, if generated by robots, will probably lose its standardization value?
Can GPT chat eventually replace content creators, translators or web developers? According to PwC, 73% of workers think technology can never replace a human mind; however, 37% are worried that automation might put their job at risk. In any case, we can think about what will happen if, just as today, Chat GPT’s server is down and inaccessible while this tool is being used by millions of people at work.
It's all going to be fascinating: let's get some popcorn and while we're watching it happen, think about what you can do to transform tech with Ironhack.
