Out of the bag

Will AI chatbots like ChatGPT revolutionise our work and life - or are we getting ahead of ourselves in fretting about the future? 

- PETER GRIFFIN

Last December, as everyone was finishing up for Christmas and dreaming of lazy days spent on the beach, I was filled with a sense of dread.

It wasn’t a premonition of tropical cyclones and biblical floods, but a realisation that I might soon be out of a job. I’d spent a couple of days experimenting with ChatGPT, the artificially intelligent chatbot released to the public in November by Silicon Valley company OpenAI.

ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5, a so-called large language model that draws on the internet’s bottomless pit of data, news websites and Wikipedia, journal articles and online archives, to generate convincing answers to your questions. It represents a branch of artificial intelligence called generative AI.

Released in “research mode” as a chat window accessible via OpenAI’s website, ChatGPT had amassed 100  million registered users by the middle of January. That’s faster uptake than Netflix or even the video-based social media network TikTok enjoyed. Arguably, ChatGPT is more entertaining than both.

Twitter is awash with examples of the fascinating, highly articulate and occasionally creepy responses ChatGPT is capable of generating. But its uncanny natural language-processing capabilities deliver more than amusing internet memes. ChatGPT can produce, in mere seconds, convincing university essays, fully formed articles and even poems and song lyrics. As someone who has made a living from stringing sentences together for more than 20 years, that’s a terrifying prospect.