Since late 2022, the advent of generative AI seems to have had an impact on multiple industries. It looks like Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ruling 2023 so far. Take OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example. Since it was released to the public, it could respond with eerily lifelike, conversational, funny and at times, unsettling responses. Imagine someone or something that can compose essays, describe art in great detail, code, debate philosophy, write a poem about Bollywood in the style of William Shakespeare and more.
And since it’s a smart AI chatbot, it can answer follow-up questions, admit when it’s made mistakes, challenge fallacious premises and even reject inappropriate requests. And in February 2023, OpenAI released a fourth version of ChatGPT. OpenAI’s GPT-3 was said to have something called “hallucinations”, where it could make factual or reasoning errors. GPT-4 is better that way, making less of those.
In ChatGPT-3, there are no image inputs that could be used, only text inputs could be utilized to get a text output. Not with ChatGPT-4. ChatGPT-4 can be more creative, have better visual input and longer context and can better collaborate on creative projects, even learning writing styles. Right now, ChatGPT is like a 3-year-old kid with an IQ of 180. Ask the kid what 3*5 is and you’ll get a correct response of “15”. Ask a slightly more complex question like, “What is the meaning of life?” and you’ll get a good answer.
So, ChatGPT, currently, has the intelligence of a really smart adult, but the judgement of that 3-year-old kid. So, it’d be really good at following instructions, but not very smart at knowing whether it’s the right or moral thing to do. Just like most people, if you come to think about it. In most cases, ChatGPT would be there to remove time-consuming tasks that are eating away people’s brainpower, which would allow people to do things that machines can’t, if that is possible by the time we get to ChatGPT-10.
Even at that point, there could be complementing in one’s home or work life, where human beings could brainstorm innovative solutions with an AI like ChatGPT and build things that are not just good, they’re great. All of this is just positing what the future may be. We don’t know what may happen, maybe, even the concept of ChatGPT would die down, the way MySpace and Blackberry were really popular and then, slowly died down.
But, at the same time, some used to say the Internet was a fad and look where we are now. Maybe, we can look at it this way: lightbulbs killed the candle-making industry in many ways when they became popular. But, the people innovated to find new roles and adapted to the new normal to continue to live on to fight another day.
