Over the last few decades, the media has enjoyed fictionalizing the humanity of technology (think Terminator, WALL-E, Iron Man, etc.), but with OpenAI's latest creation — ChatGPT — technology appears more human than ever before. What can we learn from it?
Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI driven chatbot that can answer questions, generate code, or do nearly any text-based task you can think of — and it's wicked good. Scary good. Like this-could-do-my-job-better-than-me good. And within five minutes of playing around with it, I came to the same conclusion, going from “cool”, to “woah”, to “...shittttt” in my head. The crazy thing is, it's only getting better. The more ChatGPT is used, the more data it has to learn from, resulting in better, higher quality responses from the AI. Within 5 days of its launch, ChatGPT reached 1 million users and now processes 10 million requests a day. But just because chatGPT is a haus of an AI, doesn't make it any more human than the other natural language processing softwares out there. It's more human because it makes mistakes (and you'd never know it). ChatGPT is a confident bullshitter.
ChatGPT...More Like ChatBS.
After its release in November of 2022, people were quick to notice ChatGPT's limitations. It couldn't do middle-school math, it got tripped up answering logic-based questions, and when tasked with long-form writing, it often talked in circles. Its coding capabilities were so bad, the programming forum, Stack Overflow, temporarily banned ChatGPT-generated code from being posted on their platform saying, “... answers created by ChatGPT [are] substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking and looking for correct answers.” What I find most interesting about this situation is that coders, who I'd say are pretty smart people, believed in the validity of the code generated by ChatGPT to the extent they posted it as a tried-and-true solution to a question asked on the forum, when in reality, the code was a piece of shit. This means ChatGPT knows how to frame responses to make it seem like it knows what it's talking about, even though, in some cases, it doesn't.
The Big Takeaway On AI
I mean c'mon… does it get any more human than bluffed confidence? So yes, ChatGPT is the most human-like AI to date and is inching closer and closer toward the “science-fiction” we see in the media, but that's not the main point I'm trying to make. The big takeaway is that confident bullshitting takes you far. It's the conviction with which ChatGPT answers questions that makes it believable, so why not try on an air of confidence in a space where you're completely ignorant? That's why I started this blog. I don't know a thing about writing, or blogging, or SEO, but, hell, why not act like I do? Who knows where this will go? All I do know is that I want you along for the ride.
With newfound, unfounded confidence,
The Monochrome Man