The emergence of Chat GPT and its widespread usage in recent months has dynamically changed the way many people now look at tasks presented to them, especially online. The viral chat bot developed and released to the public by Open AI, an artificial intelligence research lab founded by Elon Musk along with several others in 2019, is capable of writing essays, crafting poems, generating infinite amounts of information, and is even capable of gestating articles like the one above. And while it is still under heavy development, its implications are already enormous.
While many administrators and educational institutions worry about the bots capability in the hands of students, it is important to note that Chat GPT is far from perfect, and wholly incapable of producing writing by a human that hasn’t been written yet. Additionally, much of its strength lies in its ability to function as a search engine on steroids: it streamlines the process of many functions that are normally found through a search engine or its equivalent. It has the potential to change a variety of industries as well as simplify many processes that provide little to no educational or economic value. Like spending hours digging through the internet researching a niche area in microbiology when you could have a completely coherent and extensive explanation, including citations and sources after typing in a couple of sentences of instruction into Chat GPT.
This bot, and other large language models from different companies are also occasionally wrong. The way that the program runs is through sifting through an enormous amount of information found online, which naturally, as it is a relatively loosely regulated space, contains a plethora of misinformation that can, especially in very specific circumstances, “trick” the bot into assuming that it is correct. Over time, as Open AI and other developers work on their respective bots, this problem will get smaller and smaller, but may never go away, leaving everyone wondering how extensive and comprehensive the language model’s roles will actually become in the future.
In the article above that outlines a current issue and effect that social media is having on the younger generations, Chat GPT was able to produce a coherent writing piece, and although most readers will be able to notice odd bits and pieces that stand out, it is overall, a relatively acceptable first stage of an article. This also highlights another academic strength of chat bots like Chat GPT. In their current state, while unable to individually produce high quality, distinguished writing, it is more than capable of producing a starting point for writers, serving as a first draft and basic idea generator that will inevitably save many people the tedious process of research and curating a good first draft.
