[Here’s why you’ve been hearing so much about ChatGPT.]
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AI IS FINALLY GOOD AT STUFF, AND THAT’S A PROBLEM  
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Rebecca Heilweil
December 7, 2022
Vox
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_ Here’s why you’ve been hearing so much about ChatGPT. _

Artificial Intelligence is getting much better, mikemacmarketing
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A few weeks ago, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick told his MBA students
to play around with GPT
[[link removed]],
an artificial intelligence model, and see if the technology could
write an essay based on one of the topics discussed in his course. The
assignment was, admittedly, mostly a gimmick meant to illustrate the
power of the technology. Still, the algorithmically generated essays
— although not perfect and a tad over-reliant on the passive voice
— were at least reasonable, Mollick recalled. They also passed
another critical test: a screening by Turnitin, a popular
anti-plagiarism software. AI, it seems, had suddenly gotten pretty
good.

It certainly feels that way right now. Over the past week or so,
screenshots of conversations with ChatGPT, the newest iteration of the
AI model developed [[link removed]] by the
research firm OpenAI, have gone viral on social media. People have
directed the tool, which is freely available online, to make jokes,
write TV episodes, compose music, and even debug computer code — all
things I got the AI to do, too. More than a million people
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around with the AI, and even though it doesn’t always tell the truth
or make sense, it’s still a pretty good writer and an even more
confident bullshitter. Along with the recent updates to DALL-E
[[link removed]], OpenAI’s art-generation software,
and Lensa AI, a controversial
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portraits with the help of machine learning, GPT is a stark wakeup
call that artificial intelligence is starting to rival human ability,
at least for some things.

“I think that things have changed very dramatically,” Mollick told
Recode. “And I think it’s just a matter of time for people to
notice.”

If you’re not convinced, you can try it yourself here
[[link removed]]. The system works like any online
chatbot, and you can simply type out and submit any question or prompt
you want the AI to address.

How does GPT even work? At its core, the technology is based on a type
of artificial intelligence called a language model, a prediction
system that essentially guesses what it should write, based on
previous texts it has processed. GPT was built by training its AI with
an extraordinarily large amount of data, much of which comes from the
vast supply of data on the internet, along with billions of dollars,
including initial funding
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tech billionaires, including Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. ChatGPT was
also trained on examples of back-and-forth human conversation, which
helps it make its dialogue sound a lot more human, as a blog post
[[link removed]] published by OpenAI explains.

OpenAI is trying to commercialize its technology, but this current
release is supposed to allow the public to test it. The company made
headlines two years ago when it released GPT-3, an iteration of the
tech that could produce poems, role-play, and answer some questions.
This newest version of the technology is GPT-3.5, and ChatGPT, its
corresponding chatbot, is even better at text generation than its
predecessor. It’s also pretty good at following instructions
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like, “Write a Frog and Toad short story where Frog invests in
mortgage-backed securities.” (The story ends with Toad following
Frog’s advice and investing in mortgage-backed securities,
concluding that “sometimes taking a little risk can pay off in the
end”).

The technology certainly has its flaws. While the system is
theoretically designed not to cross some moral red lines
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it’s adamant that Hitler was bad
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it’s not difficult to trick the AI into sharing advice on how to
engage in all sorts of evil and nefarious activities, particularly if
you tell the chatbot that it’s writing fiction. The system,
like other AI
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can also say biased
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offensive things. As my colleague Sigal Samuel has explained
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an earlier version of GPT generated extremely Islamophobic content,
and also produced some pretty concerning talking points about the
treatment of Uyghur Muslims in China.

Both GPT’s impressive capabilities and its limitations reflect the
fact that the technology operates like a version of Google’s smart
compose writing suggestions, generating ideas based on what it has
read and processed before. For this reason, the AI can sound extremely
confident while not displaying a particularly deep understanding of
the subject it’s writing about. This is also why it’s easier for
GPT to write about commonly discussed topics, like a Shakespeare play
or the importance of mitochondria.

“It wants to produce texts that it deemed to be likely, given
everything that it has seen before,” explains Vincent Conitzer, a
computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon. “Maybe it sounds a
little bit generic at times, but it writes very clearly. It will
probably rehash points that have often been made on that particular
topic because it has, in effect, learned what kinds of things people
say.”

So for now, we’re not dealing with an all-knowing bot. Answers
provided by the AI were recently banned from the coding feedback
platform StackOverflow because they were very likely to be incorrect.
The chatbot is also easily tripped up by riddles (though its attempts
to answer are extremely funny
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the system is perfectly comfortable making stuff up, which obviously
makes no sense upon human scrutiny. These limitations might be
comforting to people worried that the AI could take their jobs
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or eventually pose a safety threat to humans
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But AI is getting better and better, and even this current version of
GPT can already do extremely well at certain tasks. Consider
Mollick’s assignment. While the system certainly wasn’t good
enough to earn an A, it still did pretty well. One Twitter user said
that, on a mock SAT exam, ChatGPT scored
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the 52 percentile of test takers. Kris Jordan, a computer science
professor at UNC, told Recode that when he assigned GPT his final
exam, the chatbot received a perfect grade, far better than the median
score for the humans taking his course. And yes, even before ChatGPT
went live, students were using all sorts of artificial intelligence,
including earlier versions
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GPT, to complete their assignments. And they’re probably not getting
flagged for cheating. (Turnitin, the anti-plagiarism software maker,
did not respond to multiple requests for comment).

Right now, it’s not clear how many enterprising students might start
using GPT, or if teachers and professors will figure out a way to
catch them. Still, these forms of AI are already forcing us to wrestle
with what kinds of things we want humans to continue to do, and what
we’d prefer to have technology figure out instead.

“My eighth grade math teacher told me not to rely on a calculator
since I won’t have one in my pocket all the time when I grow up,”
Phillip Dawson, an expert who studies exam cheating at Deakin
University, told Recode. “We all know how that turned out.

_REBECCA HEILWEIL [[link removed]] is a
reporter at Vox covering emerging technology, artificial intelligence,
and the supply chain._

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