CHATGPT SAYS

The world's favourite chatbot has become something of a household name across the last few months. Here's what a few curious Indians have taken back from their conversations with the new Al on the block

- Sharan Sanil and Suman Mahfuz Quazi

Flipping through these pages as one among the dwindling cohort of print readers, you might be thinking if print is dead. But ask Chat GPT and the answer is a resounding, 'No'. The artificial intelligence chatbot seems to have had all the answers for netizens since its launch in November, 2022. But are they the right answers?

Developed by OpenAI, the chatbot is a large language model (LLM) that uses a combination of 'supervised' and 'reinforcement learning' techniques to help users with responses to prompts fed by them, kind of like a search engine, but (possibly?) better. The goal is to help have human-like conversations and ultimately use it as a tool for various needs from content generation to tweaking codes. It has had enough traction to find its way into common parlance and dinner-table conversations, it's what Clubhouse and IG Live felt like in the middle of the pandemic. Recent updates have ramped up the Al's ability to process more words, understand images, write compilable code and even access the Internet independently, opening up its database to current news articles, research papers, and other information sources such as social media platforms.

Despite reaching 100 million users within two months of its release, one of ChatGPT's biggest drawbacks continues to be uneven factual accuracy. So, we spoke to a few Indians from the founder of a digital agency and a humanities student to a childrens' education expert - to understand if the popular Al tool is really helpful. And if so, in what ways?

Dalreen Ramos, 26

Student