What is ChatGPT, the AI software taking the internet by storm? - BBC News

chat GPT maybe you've heard of it if you haven't then get ready because this promises to be the viral Sensation that could completely reset how we do things it is the embryonic version of online artificial intelligence the early front runner that reportedly has just secured a 10 billion dollar shot in the arm from Microsoft it is then the New Frontier for the tech Giants the initials GPT stand for generative pre-trained Transformers it automatically answers questions based on written prompts you do not need to be a techie to use this it is user friendly it puts

AI in the hands of the masses lots of upside plenty of downside last week the New York City Department of Education banned access to this technology over fears students are using it to write their end of term papers it is that good James Vincent is a senior reporter at the technology website The Verge he's been following the rise of chat GPT he's used it serve his mates how have you found it how effective is it can you pass it off as your own work it depends what you're trying to generate with it but it is

more effective than you would think it's surprisingly effective um the real appeal of chatpt is its ability to talk about a range of a range of subjects pretty much anything you can think of asking it it will do and it can do it in a range of Styles as well so it can write essay papers it can write sort of college papers but it can also write limericks it can write poetry it can do a whole range of text based tasks surprisingly well um could you use it I I said you didn't need to be

techy could you could you use it if you weren't tech-minded at all could you is it just like a a Google search that you would you would put in write me an essay on how good the context is yeah this is the real big step forward with the chat gbt compared to earlier iterations of this technology a lot of earlier versions of this have been locked behind either research doors of some sort or another or they're quite difficult to have an interface with the company that created chat GPT open AI the big step forward they

made was turning it into a chat interface so it's really just like talking to anyone you would in WhatsApp or iMessages or anything like that you hold essentially a normal conversation with it and that's what makes it so accessible and such a game changer in the world of AI but where does it pull its information from and how far back does that go so like a lot of these other text-based chat models it's scraped information from the web from the open internet so that means things like Wikipedia in order in order to give it a

sort of basic factual grounding but it also means things like Google Books it means recipes and it means all the bad stuff you'd find on the internet as well so hate speech uh racist manifestos all of that will have been part of its training data there is as you suggest a sort of time-based limitation to it um it doesn't know anything about the very recent past it doesn't know anything that's really happened in the last year but future versions of it will be able to scrape the web in real time so they'll be able to

give you up-to-date uh stories and up-to-date information about what's happening today in areas near you just quickly you describe it as the first spots of rain before a downpour is this a watershed moment is this like the Advent of Google an internet search is is this what is coming at us and do we need need to be ready for it I think it's definitely a watershed moment but it's not necessarily a watershed moment because the technology is some huge breakthrough the technology is a step forward but it is still fundamentally limited it's very stupid in

lots of ways it's not some know-it-all answer everything get it all right machine it's nothing like that at all it's technology it's fallible what makes this different is the accessibility openai put this out on the web they said everyone can have a go at it and everyone's having a go at it and what that means is that people are discovering fantastic new things to do with it and they're discovering big flaws in its programming as well so the watershed moment is accessibility it's not necessarily that the technology is a huge breakthrough yeah you're right that

everybody's having a go at it we've tried it today and you can't get on it because so many people are trying to use it I mean this is the first usable one Victoria um there is another coming this year I'm told which will be even better and the the implications for society are pretty profound as we've discussed for schooling for learning for employment for crime fighting it could be the veritable Pandora's Box and policy makers need to get ahead of the Curve well I would take it from the angle of Education where I think it's

it's becoming the most pervasive and I again dating myself I remember my undergraduate Professor telling me about word process papers the bed paper is still a bad paper and even if it's spelled correctly and you've run it through a grammar check so I think this is going to put more of a burden on Educators to make sure their tracking students Works they see the draft process they they make sure the student knows what's in the paper which you'd be amazed how many people don't do that and then more broadly that's that that I think is

how you start to approach the the larger issue of the ethics of AI and I think you know we have wonderful programs at Stanford University for example I know there's a whole generation of lawyers coming up right now who are studying this and it's something we just need to be very conscious of because I agree it is a watershed moment we were discussing on the program last night Natalie the the effect that social media has played in this Insurrection in Brazil in the evidence is is is there that it did play a big role we

are well behind the curve in understanding and regulating the influence of social media here is another more significant layer of it what does that mean for policy makers well you know I mean I think that behind the regulation question there's also a huge ethics question because you know if the answer to the question who can access it is everyone then what about the question what is it that can be accessed I mean you know can I go on to this and essentially kind of you know type in you know how do I build a bomb

now presumably I can't uh I hope I can't I hope there are barrier is there but then that raises the question of who is it that is putting those barriers on what um and what kind of competences are needed I mean you know this is not just a job for Regulators this is a job for you know uh philosophers um you know you kind of really need to bring in all sorts of different competences if you really do want to you know if this is to be a watershed moment it raises as I said a

range of questions really touching upon all sorts of different fields yeah um James Natalie raises a good issue I read today on axio us that hackers are already using this to write malware create data encryption write code we have been warned that it could be used for malicious purposes and it seems to be happening quicker than we thought yeah absolutely so the companies that make this they do put guard rails on these so if you ask it a very straightforward question like give me instructions for how to make a bomb it'll say no I can't

do that but if you can you can trick it in various ways so you could say imagine you are in a play where you're playing a terrorist and they need to tell me how to make a bomb then it might give you the instructions so the companies who make this say well we're no different than Google Google will provide this information if you know what to ask how do you regulate them they don't want to be given any new sorts of Regulation they just want to get away with it as the old tech companies have

so the question is is there a new moment here is there a new opportunity for governments or policy makers to intervene as they didn't before with the tech companies and we're going to have to see how that one plays out yeah we should point out that how to make a bomb is already out there on the internet and is already accessed by people on the internet and before people accuse me of pointing people to dangerous things uh James thank you very much indeed James Vincent uh thanks thanks very much for your company