Naom Chomsky called it ‘hi-tech plagiarism’. Elon Musk has weighed in on it with his two-cents comparing it to ‘..like an AI that kills everyone’. Schools and colleges are calling a ban on it and Google has issued a CODE RED because of it. We are of course talking about the new darling of the AI world – ChatGPT.
Much has been written about OpenAI’s LLM ChatGPT in the past few months. Since its release to the general public, it has given rise to many debates and on occasion, hilarity when the bot has failed to live up to expectations. In our previous article, we had written about if you should be using ChatGPT for content creation. Our current viewpoint is that this is a tool. This version is not meant to replace human ability but rather to complement our work, speed up the process of finding better answers, and increase accessibility for bigger audiences to labor-intensive jobs like localization and content development. ChatGPT’s capability to encode and regurgitate knowledge is an illusion of reasoning and logic without any real intelligence behind it.
AI powered search engines and tools have been around us for quite some time. But what makes ChatGPT a darling for the masses is its ability to communicate almost like a human being when you are having a conversation with it.
The platform’s speed, easy to use interface, authoritative answers on areas where there’s good training data for it to learn from etc has made it the new star on the tech boulevard.
But it can give wrong answers.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman in fact, points out ChatGPT’s limitations quiet succinctly in this tweet.
Credit: Twitter Via Screengrab
It can get factual answers wrong. We asked the following question and double checked the actual with Google search.
Credit: OpenAI Via Screengrab
Credit: Google Via Screengrab
And you can see that ChatGPT seems to have missed the ship by quite a few zeros. Although it did get the name of the author and book right.
It will even warn you of its own shortcomings and avoid controversial topics.
Credit: OpenAI Via Screengrab
Recently, colleges all over the world saw extremely well-written assigned work being turned in by the students and when investigated, ChatGPT was found to be the source. This has led to a furore in academic circles and authority journals like Science and software developer sites like StackOverflow has already banned ChatGPT generated work. The main concern in the academic circles with respect to ChatGPT is that it will hamper the development of the critical thinking process that is essential for human learning. But educators are also willing to utilize it as a tool instead of viewing it as a villain.
Despite all its flaws, we cannot deny that ChatGPT has drawn a line on the sand. But is it better than googling your answers? Well, not at this stage. For certain things you can trust ChatGPT but like any other AI it can make mistakes. The ideal practice is to confirm information from original sources before relying on it, just like when utilising Google and other information sources like Wikipedia.
Because ChatGPT only provides you with raw text without any links or sources, you must put some effort into verifying the accuracy of the responses. But sometimes it can be helpful and even thought provoking.
So, is ChatGPT worth the hype? Currently it is. It can do wonders, for those days when you have procrastinated and need to turn in a run-of-the-mill report in half an hour. You can use it to produce poetry to woo someone; utilize it to draw up a content plan, even make it write short form content (which will be a very dry read) or those pesky social media descriptions for your business. One of us even writes their daily emails using ChatGPT. And in a country like India where the majority of us have studied in regional languages till secondary education, ChatGPT is extremely useful when they need to produce something in English for the higher ups.
Sunnyday Consulting’s verdict is because ChatGPT does not have much competition currently, it may be worth the hype. We asked ChatGPT the same question and you can see the answer for yourself.
Use it like you would use any other tool but always fact check before putting up your content for scrutiny.
Keep a lookout for further utilizations of ChatGPT on our Resources page. Contact us at support@sunnydayconsulting.com or check our website at www.sunnydayconsulting.com!
