It’s quite remarkable, you can ask him “give me the definition of superpowers” and he will give it to you, then you say “now tell me in a poem”
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ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence tool that was developed by OpenAI, a private company based in San Francisco, in November 2022. Similar to Google in some ways, but instead of just giving you a list of pages you can visit to find your answer, ChatGPT can immediately give you a summarized answer.
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Postmedia spoke with Alona Fyshe, Associate Professor at the University of Alberta and Fellow of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), on OpenAI’s ChatGPT program.
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What are AI chat programs like ChatGPT?
Fyshe: ChatGPT is what we call a big language model, it’s basically a neural network that has been trained to generate language.
How do you train something like this? Do you teach him to have conversations by having him read other conversations?
Fyshe: Yeah, so they (OpenAI) trained it using series of back and forth conversations between people and then they were asking new people to write down what the next twist in the conversation would be. And then they trained the model to try to generate the next bends. One of the innovations they had was multiple people generating the next thing to say, and then new people ranking the next thing to say…this gives the system an idea of what’s the best next thing to say. But of course, there are hundreds of things to say next. So they gave him (ChatGPT) an idea of the ranking between the things you could say. That’s part of the reason it’s such a hit.
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What can tools like this be used for?
Fyshe: There are many uses. Even before ChatGPT, there was software that wrote summaries of sports games or emailed copies or copies that you put in a newsletter. The real stereotypical writing that people might not want to do. There are writings that I think are good for computers. But ChatGPT is a departure as it leans more towards creative writing than people do.
Below is an example from the OpenAI for ChatGPT website:
user: “help me write a note to introduce myself to my neighbor”
ChatGPT: “Hello my name is [Your Name] and I just moved in next door. I wanted to reach out and introduce myself. I look forward to getting to know you and the neighborhood. If you ever need anything or just want to chat, feel free to drop by or give me a call.
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Better,
[Your Name]
Fyshe: That’s pretty remarkable, you can ask him “give me the definition of superpowers” and he’ll give it to you, then you say “now tell me in a poem” and he’ll give you a rhyming poem. It’s a huge leap forward from what we’ve seen before.
What are some of the benefits of something like ChatGPT?
Fyshe: I heard that people worry a lot about how students will use it, but speaking with students they found it very useful. One of the things ChatGPT is really good at is giving you the kind of answers you might find in a textbook. As a definition or a short explanation, ChatGPT excels in this area. I think it can also help students think about their questions, the process of asking a question and then following that question is in itself instructive.
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How long would this system take to make?
Fyshe:Part of the reason this was such an incredible breakthrough was that they (OpenAI) spent so much time on the next two possible conversation parts, but also identifying when the system was generating offensive content. I don’t know if you remember when Microsoft released their chatbot. This chatbot didn’t stick around for very long because he wasn’t given the boundaries he had to stay within and he quickly became racist. I don’t know how long it took them (OpenAI) to create this model, but it’s definitely a lot of work.
Can ChatGPT give you wrong answers?
Fyshe: He was trained mostly on the correct answers, but there are examples of people showing him giving the wrong answer. I asked him some logical questions and he gave approximately true answer and gave incorrect answer of some of them.
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What about people who would just use ChatGPT to do their homework or write an article for themselves? is there a way to curb this?
Fyshe: I think a more forward-looking thing to do would be to ask, “How can we change our assignments so that ChatGPT isn’t useful?” Or say, “Go ahead and use ChatGPT, but the mission isn’t testing things ChatGPT can do well, we’re testing something else.” Just recently, ChatGPT released information about a watermarking system it has to be able to detect when text has been written by ChatGPT.
I think the most alarming thing about generating your postings is generating misinformation, asking ChatGPT to write an article about a conspiracy theory that could provide a politician takedown. We’ve had issues with external forces on social media trying to change public opinion and I think ChatGPT or similar systems could help with that.