Find out why everyone is obsessed with this chatbot, and how it could revolutionise the way that you work.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) language model application, which has been designed to write in a human way. ‘Chat’ refers to the fact that it is a chatbot; an online robot that can essentially talk to you. ‘GPT’ stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which means that ChatGPT was exposed to a lot of data to teach it to write as a human does.
Chat GPT launched in November 2022, and gained 1 million users in the first week of its launch. It has since amassed a huge following, with reportedly around 13 million individual active users visiting ChatGPT daily.
What can ChatGPT do?
You can ask ChatGPT to create anything that can be written, quickly and easily. Give ChatGPT a job description and your experience and it can create a personal cover letter. Tell it the ingredients in your fridge, and it can create recipes. Chat GPT can create business proposals, gift ideas, computer code and instructions from scratch. Ask ChatGPT a question and it will give you an answer almost instantly, written in a way that is easy to understand.
Additionally, ChatGPT remembers what a user has said during the conversation. This means that you can ask ChatGPT follow up questions, ask it to add something to what it has written, or change a part of it that you don’t like. If you’ve asked ChatGPT to write a letter, you can then ask it to rewrite the letter in a way that is more formal, less direct, or even subtly suggests that you’re a pirate. The most recent version of ChatGPT can generate up to 25,000 words at a time, and can use 26 different languages. The possibilities are, quite literally, endless.
However, there are a couple of things that ChatGPT struggles with. As the chatbot was trained on data up until 2021, it sometimes lacks knowledge of more recent events. It also struggles with dates, numbers and sources and can occasionally provide incorrect information. As it is trained by humans, it may also have some biases and its responses could be affected by these. ChatGPT also refuses to answer inappropriate requests.
Why is Chat GPT such a big deal?
At first glance, a chatbot might seem like an odd thing to break the internet. However, ChatGPT has significant real-world applications, and it has already started to make waves in a number of different industries. ChatGPT can create lesson plans, objectives, quizzes and essay questions for teachers; it can solve complex programming issues for IT engineers; it can take on the identity of Steve Jobs and critically engage with a business proposal. Ultimately, it can do a huge amount of cognitive work quickly and easily.
However, the impact of ChatGPT isn’t wholly positive. Students began asking ChatGPT to write their essays, resulting in huge concerns for educators. This recently prompted plagiarism software Turnitin to work with ChatGPT to identify submissions that have been wholly or partly written by AI. The ethical concerns don’t stop there; with ChatGPT’s extensive capabilities, many are worried about the possibility of jobs being replaced by AI.
Ready to give it a go?
ChatGPT is currently free to use, although users can upgrade to ChatGPT Plus which allows for even faster responses, priority access to new features and use of the application even when the demand is high.
