ChatGPT

ChatGPT, software that allows a user to ask it questions using conversational, or natural, language. It was released on November 30, 2022, by the American company OpenAI and almost immediately disturbed academics, journalists, and others because of concern that it was impossible to distinguish human-generated from ChatGPT-generated writing.

Language models produce text based on the probability for a word to occur based on previous words in the sequence. By being trained on about 45 terabytes of text from the Internet, the GPT-3.5 language model used by ChatGPT calculates that some sequences of words are more likely to occur than others. For example, “the cat sat on the mat” is more likely to occur in English than “sat the the mat cat on” and thus would be more likely to appear in a ChatGPT response.

ChatGPT refers to itself as “a language model developed by OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence research lab.” The model is based on the “GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture, which is a type of neural network designed for natural language processing tasks.” ChatGPT says its primary purpose “is to generate human-like text, which can be used for a variety of applications, such as chatbots, automated content creation, and language translation.”

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It continues by saying, “The model can understand and respond to user input in a way that mimics human conversation, allowing for more natural and engaging interactions. Additionally, ChatGPT can generate text in a variety of styles and formats, such as news articles, emails, and poetry, making it versatile and useful for a wide range of applications.” For example, when asked to produce a haiku about Encyclopædia Britannica, ChatGPT generated:

Encyclopedia old
Endless knowledge to behold
Wisdom in its pages.

(However, this haiku has seven syllables instead of five on the first line and six instead of five on the third line.)

ChatGPT impressed many with its command of written English and served as a demonstration of how far artificial intelligence (AI) had advanced. Within five days of its introduction, more than one million users had signed up for a free account to interact with ChatGPT. The software showed that it could pass exams in advanced courses. For example, Wharton Business School professor Christian Terwiesch found that ChatGPT passed the final exam in his course in operations management; however, on some questions it made “surprising mistakes in relatively simple calculations at the level of 6th grade math.” Educators became concerned that students would cheat by having ChatGPT write their essays, with some even proposing that essays should no longer be done as homework assignments. The American media company BuzzFeed announced that it would use OpenAI tools, such as ChatGPT, to produce content, such as quizzes, that would be personalized for readers.

In 1950 British mathematician Alan Turing proposed a test for assessing whether a computer can be described as thinking. A human questioner interrogates both a human subject and a computer. By means of a series of such tests, a computer’s success at “thinking” can be measured by its probability of being misidentified as the human subject. BuzzFeed data scientist Max Woolf said that ChatGPT had passed the Turing test in December 2022, but some experts claim that ChatGPT did not pass a true Turing test because in ordinary usage ChatGPT often states that it is a language model.

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Although ChatGPT had many strong traits, it also had some surprising weaknesses. The model can add two-digit numbers (e.g., 23 + 56) with complete accuracy, but for multiplying two-digit numbers (e.g., 23 × 56), it produces the right answer only about 30 percent of the time.

Like other large language models, ChatGPT can sometimes “hallucinate,” a term used to describe the tendency for such models to respond with inaccurate or misleading information. For example, ChatGPT was asked to tell the Greek myth of Hercules and the ants. There is no such Greek myth; nevertheless, ChatGPT told a story of Hercules learning to share his resources with a colony of talking ants when marooned on a desert island. When asked if there really was such a Greek myth, ChatGPT apologized and replied that there was no such myth but that it had created a fable based on its understanding of Greek mythology. When further asked why it made up such a myth instead of simply saying that there was no such myth, it apologized again and said that “as a language model, my main function is to respond to prompts by generating text based on patterns and associations in the data I’ve been trained on.” ChatGPT tends not to say that it does not know an answer to a question but instead produces probable text based on the prompts given to it.

ChatGPT is, at least, forthright about its limitations. When asked if it is a reliable source of information, it replies that “it is not recommended to rely on ChatGPT as a sole source of factual information. Instead, it should be used as a tool to generate text or complete language-based tasks, and any information provided by the model should be verified with credible sources.” Even answers to questions about computer programming languages, an unlikely source of hallucinations, have proved inaccurate so often that the popular programming question-and-answer site Stack Overflow temporarily banned answers from ChatGPT.