OpenAI’s ChatGPT: Disrupting Life As We Know It
High school and college English teachers are amazed by the caliber of ChatGPT’s essay responses, claiming that it can form better essays than students, and within seconds.
(Getty Images)
OpenAI, a private company funded by Microsoft, recently launched ChatGPT, the most powerful artificial intelligence technology known. In only a week after launch, ChatGPT attracted more than a million users. With its popularity growing, people worry that the world is not ready for such a drastic change.
So, what is ChatGPT?
Among its many capabilities, ChatGPT has gained popularity for its creative writing abilities. Using knowledge from millions of books, websites, research papers and more, the machine-learning model generates paragraphs within seconds to answer any imputed question or prompt. The user may even input an essay and ask ChatGPT to expand or cut down words.
High school and college English teachers are amazed by the caliber of ChatGPT’s essay responses, claiming that it can form better essays than students, and within seconds. The model’s responses are dynamic, meaning they change every time even if the same essay prompt is entered. This brings up the concern of cheating, or students submitting ChatGPT’s responses instead of their own. Luckily, OpenAI’s developers have programmed the model to bury a custom watermark, or writing structure, in each response, which can be used to identify ChatGPT’s writing when passed through an API. However, even this solution does not completely resolve the problem as people may simply edit the writing until the watermark is broken.
Essay writing is a critical tool used in every level of education. It is integral to forming cohesive arguments and expressing them through persuasive writing. Student essays are also a large component of college admissions. Finding a solid replacement to essay writing will certainly be difficult.
Unfortunately, ChatGPT’s deep understanding of the human language will soon put many jobs at risk, including journalists, novelists and essay editors. The model has even started to understand how to translate English to code. Developers can ask the model to debug or even reduce the memory usage of their code. With refinement, ChatGPT may even start writing its own code, which would put many developers at risk of losing their jobs.
ChatGPT’s model must still be strengthened before it can replace jobs, but it definitely shows potential. The jobs that appear to be safe from AI, for now, are those that require leadership and out-of-the-box thinking, such as company executives and researchers.
ChatGPT can and will disrupt life as we know it. We can only hope that the world will catch up to its rapid changes.