March 2023
VOLUME 42, ISSUE 3
You don’t have to be a techie to have heard about a curious new technology called ChatGPT. We’ve been hearing about it for a while, and now it seems like everyone is talking about it. So, what is it?
ChatGPT is a revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) technology that has been redefining the way people interact with AI. The acronym GPT stands for “generative pretrained transformer.” If you’re like us, that definition doesn’t tell you a whole lot. ChatGPT is best described by what it does. The technology offers a conversational experience that is unlike anything else, making it one of the most advanced AI technologies available on the market today.
At its core, ChatGPT uses natural language processing (NLP) to create human-like conversations. By utilizing NLP, ChatGPT can better understand and interact with users in a more natural and intuitive way. With this technology, users can ask questions and make statements as if they were talking to a real person, giving them the feeling of having an actual conversation.
How does ChatGPT get its smarts? The technology has been “trained” by “reading” an incredible amount of data from the internet. ChatGPT has consumed knowledge from entire book repositories and even the data within Wikipedia. So, if you want to ask ChatGPT about any subject you can think of, chances are the AI will be able to carry on a human-like conversation with you on that subject.
Beyond conversational capabilities, ChatGPT’s sophisticated algorithms can process complex tasks, such as understanding context or analyzing sentiment. This means that you can use the platform for things like customer service inquiries or product feedback surveys and get accurate results quickly. With ChatGPT’s automated capabilities, businesses can save time and money by eliminating the need for manual labor when dealing with customer queries or feedback forms.
ChatGPT also offers numerous customization options so that businesses can tailor their chatbot experience according to their needs. For example, users can customize their chatbot’s response style by adjusting its voice type or tone of speech. This allows companies to create bots that match their brand identity or better serve customers from different cultures or backgrounds. Furthermore, companies are also able to integrate other services into their chatbot so customers can access information, such as news updates or social media posts, straight from the bot’s conversation window while they’re chatting away with it.
Are there potential applications of this technology in the legal sector? You bet! In fact, it’s already being used.
A professor at the University of Minnesota School of Law gave ChatGPT an exam that he had also given to his class. ChatGPT passed the exam with a nonstellar C+, but that means it did pass! If that isn’t wild enough, a company named DoNotPay markets what they call the “world’s first robot lawyer” and received loads of press coverage over an attempt to use this technology to defend a man in court against a speeding ticket in California. The state bar stepped in and stopped this brazen attempt to use a robot lawyer in court, but with this revolutionary technology gaining acceptance, will AI lawyers become a real thing?
Right now, anyone can access ChatGPT for free via chat.openai.com. We took ChatGPT for a spin and tried to carry on a dialogue with the AI on several different topics. We were generally impressed. Were we fooled into thinking we were chatting with a human? No, but the human-like responses to our queries were very impressive.
Just to give you an example, here is one question we posed to ChatGPT and the answer we were given:
ChatGPT:
We were duly impressed — ChatGPT gave a competent answer instantaneously. So we went a bit further and illustrated how ChatGPT may even be wiser than us.
We were testing out this site right at the end of the NFL regular season, and our beloved hometown team, the Titans, had completely squandered a golden playoff opportunity by losing their last seven games. We were still feeling the sting of that failure when we posed this loaded question to ChatGPT:
ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I don’t have personal opinions or emotions, but it’s not accurate to say a team “sucks” based on one season or a few games. Performance can vary in sports due to a variety of factors such as injuries, roster changes, coaching and competition. It’s important to evaluate a team’s performance objectively and consider the context.
Totally devoid of the passion that inflamed our question, ChatGPT calmly gave a wise answer and put us in our place. If nothing else, maybe ChatGPT can help us all look at the world more rationally. Nonetheless, we don’t think we have nearly heard the end of this technology and its impact on society.