Chat GPT: The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown
ChatGPT has dominated headlines both in the technology world and society as a whole in its very brief existence. The website reached 1 million users in the span of a mere 5 days. For comparison, Spotify took 5 months to reach the same milestone, while Netflix took 3.5 years (Statista, 2023). Additionally, it passed the Turing test Ð a measure of whether or not a robotic deviceÕs performance of a task is distinguishable from that of humans. While many may view this as the realisation of what the likes of James Cameron and Alex Proyas have warned us about in ÔThe TerminatorÕ and ÔI, RobotÕ, others view it in a more positive light, with ChatGPT only the beginning of what is to come in artificial intelligence technology. Regardless of what either side may think, it is worthwhile to consider both the positive and negative aspects of any new technology, and this is certainly one of those cases.
The Case for ChatGPT
The adoption of ChatGPT in office and educational contexts cannot be understated. It has the potential to automate and expedite everyday processes to a very high standard. Examples include everyday mundane tasks such as drafting emails, creating to-do lists, finding the cheapest options out of a choice of products and so on. This can all be achieved in a much quicker time than a human can possibly do, and in this same vein, remarkable possibilities become evident. For instance, ChatGPT can be used in healthcare contexts to make better-informed decisions for patients as the program can instantly scan for solutions and make a suggestion based on the best possible outcome, thereby reducing human error in healthcare decision-making.
The Case against ChatGPT
It is important to note that, while a powerful chatbot with a colossal level of knowledge, ChatGPT does have its limitations. Continuing on from the example of healthcare mentioned previously, although ChatGPT has the potential to improve decision-making, its capacity to do so is limited by the information it scans or, in other words, the data it ingests to arrive at certain conclusions. Secondly, ChatGPT sometimes justÉ makes things up. This has been a notable issue since its release and it is important to double-check sources and information, just to make sure ChatGPT wasnÕt lying to you.
In conclusion, ChatGPT is an impressive online program that can help us with our everyday tasks, and even improve some aspects of our lives by reducing decision fatigue, time taken to research holiday destinations and draft emails of varying emotional tones and lengths. However, considering the limitations of the program, it is probably not as life changing as was once thoughtÉ yet. ChatGPT will only improve as it gets more intelligent and fed more high-quality data, and maybe we will have to re-evaluate our working lives to accommodate this new program. But for now, we can just use it for the fun stuff. IÕll finish with a prompt I gave to ChatGPT to make a joke.
Bibliography
Biswas, S. S., 2023. Role of chat gpt in public health. Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 51(5), pp. 868-869.
Statista, 2023. ChatGPT Sprints to One Million Users. [Online]
Available at: https://www.statista.com/chart/29174/time-to-one-million-users/
[Accessed 8 June 2023].
