The Top Ten Stories on World-Stunning chatGPT
While OpenAI has a knack for knocking the world on its keyster with its AI writing tech, it outdid itself with its release of chatGPT Nov. 30.
The AI tech has the ability to auto-generate written responses of up to 500 words to virtually any question asked of it — in seconds.
Currently, many in the top echelons of the world’s news media — as well as countless other knowledge workers across dozens of industries — are gushing over chatGPT’s writing prowess.
And many in the news media and others have also been triggered once again by the fear– only this time ever-more forcefully: Will AI take my job away?
More than a million people signed-up to give chatGPT a free test-drive within the first five days of its release.
And untold numbers more have signed-up on OpenAI’s waiting list to be next.
In a phrase: chatGPT is a viral phenomenon.
OpenAI’s secret?
While the company has been working in automated writing for a number of years, its decision to offer the latest incarnation of its AI writing tech as a chatbot turned-out to be genius.
Used to be, to get a first-hand experience with AI writing, you had to set aside a fair amount of time to get familiar with the technology — and engage in a significant amount of trial-and-error — before you were comfortable working its magic.
But now — with a chatbot armed with AI writing tech — that’s all changed.
After all, anyone can ask a chatbot a question.
Moreover, while not perfect, chatGPT has proven it can answer virtually any question instantly with automated writing that is tighter, smarter and generally much more on-point than what its predecessors can produce.
For writers, that techno sleight-of-hand is an especially grave threat, given that chatGPT can output up to 500 words of quality text by responding to just one question.
As most writers know, many blog posts run about 500 words.
So theoretically, any Web site owner could auto-generate a blog post in a matter of seconds by simply asking chatGPT a single question.
Not satisfied with the result? Simply ask chatGPT the same question again and it will give you a slightly different answer.
Still not satisfied? Change the wording of your question a bit, and chatGPT will spit-out a much different response of up to 500 words.
Need a much longer post? Simply create a blog outline in the form of five questions, and pose each question to chatGPT, one-at-a-time.
The result: The auto-creation of five sections of a blog post that together — perhaps with a little human editing — run as long as 2,500 words.
Who needs a writer when you can get a machine to do it for you for pennies-on-the-dollar?
Bottom line: For the first time, automated writing has entered the public water supply.
Virtually everyone is — or will be impacted — by chatGPT very rapidly.
And for many, the world will never be the same.
Here’s what people are saying the transformative tech:
*NY Times: The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT: Writer Kevin Roose offers an excellent, seasoned overview of chatGPT — which he describes in part as “ominously good at answering the types of open-ended analytical questions that frequently appear on school assignments.
“Maybe this is, as some commenters have posited, the beginning of the end of all white-collar knowledge work, and a precursor to mass unemployment.”
Even more ominous, Roose indicates, is that ChatGPT “isn’t even OpenAI’s best A.I. model.
“That would be GPT-4, the next incarnation of the company’s large language model — which is rumored to be coming out sometime next year.
“We are not ready.”
If you read only one article on chatGPT this week, this is the one to grab.
*InvestorPlace: With ChatGPT, AI Has Just Reached Its ‘iPhone Moment:’ Unlike many writers, Luke Lango’s awe over the impact and promise of chatGPT is unbridled.
Observes Lango: “Five days ago, the world changed forever.
“Millionaires were made in the PC Revolution.
“They were made in the Internet Revolution and the Smartphone Revolution.
“Now, they’ll be made in a new tech Revolution (triggered by chatGPT) that could dwarf those others.”
*The Atlantic: ChatGPT Will End High School English: While many high school and college teachers have been grumbling about the cancerous threat of already established automated essay writing tools, high school English teacher Daniel Herman sees the new chatGPT as exponentially more dangerous.
Observes Herman: “The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.
“If you’re looking for historical analogs, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby — and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding.
“My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.
“What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor.”
*NY Post: ChatGPT Could Render Google Obsolete in Two Years: A Swiss Army Knife in the world of words, chatGPT also is extremely accomplished at producing research and information — on demand.
During the past decade or so, that has essentially been the undisputed purview of the Google search engine.
But that could all change with chatGPT.
Observes Paul Buchheit, a Gmail developer, commenting on chatGPT: “Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption.
“AI will eliminate the search engine result page, which is where they make most of their money.”
Adds tech wizard Elon Musk: “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”
*Marketer: ChatGPT Will Be a Great Collaborator — Not Job Killer: Victoria Spall, an account director at Browser Media Agency, is notably sanguine in response to the emergence of chatGPT.
Instead of running for the hills, marketers should embrace chatGPT, according to Spall.
She observes the tool is especially adept at:
~Auto-generating compelling ad copy
~Whipping-up quick summaries
~Coming up with keyword suggestions
*Vox: Stormclouds Ahead for Wordsmiths: Unlike Spall, Vox writer Rebecca Heilweil is much more uneasy about chatGPT’s potential threat to the jobs of writers and other knowledge workers.
Observes Heilweil: “AI is finally good at stuff — and that’s a problem.”
Adds Heilweil: “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.”
Perfect grade?
Yes, perfect can be disturbing.
*WP (WordPress) Tavern: Prototype WordPress Plugin Instantly Created for chatGPT: Johnathon Williams, a WordPress developer, says he was able to create a prototype chatGPT plugin for WordPress on his first try.
Such a plugin would offer millions of WordPress users instant access to chatGPT, and be able to use the auto-writing engine inside the WordPress environment — a major convenience.
The tool Williams used to create the plugin: chatGPT itself, which also happens to be very good at auto-writing computer code.
Observes Williams: “Very soon, describing the WordPress plugin you need to ChatGPT will generate a new one faster than searching for an existing one in the plugin directory.
“This won’t be true for all types of plugins, of course.
“But for relatively simple plugins performing established tricks — well ‘very soon’ should probably read ‘right now.'”
The WordPress authoring system for creating Web sites is used to create and maintain about 36% of Web sites worldwide, according to Kinsta.
*Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman: With AI Writing, A Little Pain With the Good: When chatGPT turns the head of a nobel-prize-winning economist less than a week after its release, you know something special is happening.
Krugman’s verdict on the tool’s potential impact on jobs: There, there now. Some writers and similar knowledge workers may experience job loss.
But on the bright side, new jobs may be created in AI.
Observes Krugman: “It is difficult to predict exactly how AI will impact the demand for knowledge workers, as it will likely vary, depending on the industry and specific job tasks.
“However, it is possible that in some cases, AI and automation may be able to perform certain knowledge-based tasks more efficiently than humans, potentially reducing the need for some knowledge workers.
“This could include tasks such as data analysis, research and report writing.
“However, it is also worth noting that AI and automation may also create new job opportunities for knowledge workers, particularly in fields related to AI development and implementation.”
That’s great solace for people trained in AI.
As for writers and other knowledge workers employed in more traditional roles: Not so much.
*ZeeNews (India): How to Use ChatGPT — A Step-by-Step Guide: If you’re one of the millions chomping-at-the-bit to give chatGPT a whirl, ZeeNews offers your a quick primer on how to get started using the system on Android.
Only have a smartphone?
No problem — chatGPT works on smartphones too.
For another take on getting started with chatGPT, check-out Gizmodo’s advice on how to use the tool.
*Analytics India: OpenAI’s chatGPT — Just the Tip of the Iceberg: While OpenAI has an uncanny ability to generate massive attention from the news media for its new creations, its underlying AI-automated writing tech is only one of many currently under development worldwide.
Turns-out, research on the genre of tech OpenAI uses to power its automated writing — an AI language model — is also well underway at a number of major companies and research groups, according to Analytics India.
Here are those firms and the language models they’re developing:
~BigScience Workshop by Hugging Face: Bloom
~Google: GlaM
~Google: PaLM
~Google: BERT
~Google: LaMDA
~DeepMind: Gopher
~DeepMind: Chinchilla
~nVidia and Microsoft: Megatron-Turing NLG
~Meta: OPT
~Amazon: AlexaTM
(DeepMind is owned by Google parent company, Alphabet.)
Check-out the Analytics India article for an excellent rundown on each of these AI language models.
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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.