{"id":8596,"date":"2023-04-03T13:01:48","date_gmt":"2023-04-03T17:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tcn.tidbits.com\/?p=9762"},"modified":"2023-04-03T16:12:57","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T20:12:57","slug":"chatgpt-and-generative-ai-will-be-an-increasingly-large-part-of-our-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/chatgpt-and-generative-ai-will-be-an-increasingly-large-part-of-our-future\/","title":{"rendered":"ChatGPT and Generative AI Will Be an Increasingly Large Part of Our Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you heard of ChatGPT<\/a>? It\u2019s likely\u2014the service was launched in November 2022 and gathered 1 million users in the first week. It now has over 100 million users. However, many people are still unaware of it. If you haven\u2019t heard of ChatGPT\u2014or have heard of it but are unclear on what it is or what effect it and similar AI services might have on the world\u2014read on.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot designed to mimic a human conversationalist. Its goal is to make communicating with computers more natural. Type anything into ChatGPT, and it will respond in clearly written English. You can also ask it to write things for you, like email responses or school essays, and it can generate text in a wide variety of styles, generating fairy tales, poetry, and even computer code. Unlike most chatbots, ChatGPT remembers what you\u2019ve said and considers that context in its replies.<\/p>\n

One way to think of ChatGPT is as a sort of search engine like Google or Microsoft\u2019s Bing. There are three huge differences, however. First, ChatGPT answers your queries directly, rather than presenting you with a list of websites that contain information about your query. Second, although it sounds confident, ChatGPT often gets facts wrong. Third, if you ask ChatGPT the same question twice, you might not get precisely the same answer\u2014there\u2019s an element of randomness in its responses.<\/p>\n

How could this be? ChatGPT is what\u2019s called a \u201clarge language model,\u201d a neural network that trains itself on extremely large quantities of text\u2014reportedly 300 billion words from 570 GB of datasets. That means ChatGPT doesn\u2019t \u201cknow\u201d anything. Instead, it looks at a prompt and generates a response based on the probability that one word follows another. In some ways, it\u2019s the ultimate form of auto-complete. Ask ChatGPT to write a fairy tale, and it will start \u201cOnce upon a time\u201d because in its training data, text that matches the prompt of \u201cfairy tale\u201d very likely begins with those words. That\u2019s also the source of its mistakes\u2014just because words occur near one another says nothing about their relationship.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to avoid anthropomorphizing ChatGPT and similar AI-driven chatbots that are flooding the market. Their answers sound utterly convincing, but again, they don\u2019t \u201cknow\u201d anything. Despite AI being short for \u201cartificial intelligence,\u201d they don\u2019t think (whatever that might mean). They have no agenda and aren\u2019t trying to convince or mislead.<\/p>\n

Rather than think of an AI as a person on the other side of the screen, it\u2019s essential to realize its limitations, a few of which include the following:<\/p>\n