FEBRUARY, 2023 / By Ben Wilson
What is ChatGPT & What Can It Do?
ChatGPT is a brand-new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that is able to respond to questions and inputs from users in a human-like, conversational way. It can generate text in different styles, summarise documents, write essays and code, and perform a range of other language tasks too.
Released recently, in November 2022 by OpenAI, it has become the fastest-growing consumer app ever produced. Talk of this tool is spreading incredibly quickly through businesses, schools and across social media, signing up 1 million users in the 5 days after being released and 100 million users by January 2023. TikTok didn’t reach 100 million users for nine months, and it took Instagram two and a half years to reach that figure.1
Based in San Francisco, OpenAI was co-founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and is backed by some well-known investors, including Microsoft who have invested billions of dollars into this investment.
GPT stands for ‘Generative Pretrained Transformer’, the large language model that ChatGPT is based on. It is programmed to understand human language and has been trained on an enormous amount of text data from the internet. This assists it with generating human-like responses to questions and prompts so it can have coherent and natural conversations with users.
Chatbots have gained momentum for years now, as companies search for ways to provide their customers with what they need. ChatGPT is rapidly being picked up by businesses that use chatbots as it can automate a lot of areas of the customer experience.
The Benefits of ChatGPT
With such incredible popularity so quickly, it is obvious that ChatGPT offers things that other chatbots do not.
- Firstly, ChatGPT is easily accessible as it is public to anyone via OpenAI’s website. It is a free tool for the time being, although there is also a paid version available that is faster and doesn’t reach usage capacity.
- It can be used for a wide range of tasks, from planning a child’s party, school homework, composing music, writing poetry, assisting in the healthcare industry or compiling legal briefs. ChatGPT knows a lot and it responds quickly.
- ChatGPT responds with human-like text and has the ability to log context from its users’ previous messages in a thread and then use it to form responses later on.
- It can multitask and therefore can translate text, summarise and answer questions at the same time.
- Being able to generate programming code, programmers are saving a lot of time writing software in certain situations.
- ChatGPT has been programmed to keep some topics off limits such as questions that are deemed discriminatory or offensive. This includes inputs that are racist, sexist, homophobic, hateful etc. ChatGPT will not engage in illegal activities either.
Microsoft & Bing AI
Microsoft have recently announced that they have released new AI-powered updates to their Bing search engine and Edge browser. They have incorporated some of OpenAI’s GPT language technologies into the new Bing, the same GPT language model as ChatGPT.
Using this technology, Bing compiles results from different sources, summarises documents, answers questions and can basically chat with humans. It’s a revolution for the future of search engines, however improvements are needed to deal with factual errors and confusing conversations.
What’s The Catch?
There are some concerns about ChatGPT’s capabilities at the current time. It’s not smart enough to replace humans yet and experts advise against relying on this bot for anything important.
- Responses can contain factual inaccuracies or even invent fictional names or fail to solve math calculations.
- Some of ChatGPT’s responses are simply weird, and possibly scary so there is a way to go before it is a valuable tool for everyone.
- Students are using ChatGPT to generate entire essays for them. However, it is fair to point out that students have had encyclopedias to copy from in the past, and then search engines so it’s probably just a different way of doing so.
- Because ChatGPT can write software and programming code, hackers are testing the tool to write malicious code.
- ChatGPT’s knowledge comes from 2021 data but that is likely to keep on improving.
Google has released a similar chatbot called ‘Bard’ in response to ChatGPT as the OpenAI tool was seen as a threat to web searching. However, Bard too, currently has several flaws.
While it appears that there is work to be done to improve things, particularly with accuracy of responses, this exciting AI technology is bound to shake up internet search behaviour and that will have a flow on effect for SEO and Google Ads. Already, users are finding that ChatGPT answers often surpass what Google can suggest, so sit tight for what will emerge in this space. The current and potential benefits of ChatGPT are likely to amaze.
It is thought that ChatGPT will be the precursor to more advanced AI systems in the future. The possibilities are definitely there. Our team of specialist consultants will be keeping an eye on how the technology unfolds!