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What Is ChatGPT?: An Article For Those Lost In The Shuffle
Welcome to this week’s Deep-Fried Dive with Fry Guy! In these long-form articles, Fry Guy conducts in-depth analyses of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) developments and developers. Today, Fry Guy takes a step back to help people sort out this whole “ChatGPT” thing. We hope you enjoy!
*Notice: We do not receive any monetary compensation from the people and projects we feature in the Sunday Deep-Fried Dives with Fry Guy. We explore these projects and developers solely to showcase interesting and cutting-edge AI developments and uses.*
🤯 MYSTERY LINK 🤯
(The mystery link can lead to ANYTHING AI-related. Tools, memes, and more…)
“ChatGPT” is one of the biggest buzzwords in AI. But many people still don’t know what it is, what it stands for, or how to use it.
Now, you might be thinking, “Everyone uses ChatGPT! What are you talking about, Fry Guy?” If you are thinking this, you are actually in the minority. Believe it or not, only 58% of American adults know what ChatGPT is, and only 14% have actually tried it.
AI is complex, and anyone who reads our newsletter knows that there is a lot to keep up with. Because developments are moving so fast, it’s really easy to get lost in the shuffle of AI. Some people are running full steam ahead, while others are not even sure what AI is or why people are talking about it. Today, we want to extend a hand to those who are getting drowned by the terminology and emerging technology—those who are not even sure where to start or how to use this weird “ChatGPT thing.”
WHAT IS CHATGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by a tech company called OpenAI. This chatbot can process natural human language and generate responses. ChatGPT stands for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer.” Woah! Are you lost already? Don’t be. Let’s look at the name a bit further:
Chat: This, quite straightforward part of the name, refers to a computer program you can chat with. Like texting a friend, you interact with ChatGPT through natural language—no coding skills or computer science degree is required. You might think of it as, quite literally, chatting with a bot.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer: This term refers to how the system, or “chatbot,” is trained to write. Basically, the developers fed the system a bunch of human writing, and from that, the system learned (known as “machine learning”) how to understand human text and respond to that text like a human.
ChatGPT was originally released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. In less than five days after its launch, it gained 1 million users! Since then, people have been flocking to the chatbot for help with all sorts of tasks. As of May 2024, ChatGPT usage has grown to over 200 million weekly users around the globe.
But why has ChatGPT gotten so popular, and why is everyone so excited about it? Well, ChatGPT has been trained on a ton of internet data. So by asking it a question, you can oftentimes get really good and accurate responses. It makes for a great conversational companion that can answer your questions, help you draft emails, assist in writing code, and much more!
As time has passed, ChatGPT has gotten better and better. These improvements have been reflected by updated versions of ChatGPT, like GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, and o1. These are just fancy names to mark new updates. Many of these updates are a result of more training data (more human content has been fed into ChatGPT for it to learn from), which allows the bot to respond in more informed, human-like ways. In this way, ChatGPT has gotten “smarter” and more helpful for various tasks. It has had some very notable upgrades that have emerged since its birth, making it more than just an average chatbot. Let’s look at some of these enhanced features.
The ability to remember information
Newer upgrades to ChatGPT have given it a “memory” ability. This not only allows users to save conversations in tabs to revisit later, but it also allows ChatGPT to learn from interactions to provide a more personalized touch. For instance, if you tell the bot that you are a teacher, it may store this in its memory to answer future questions in a way that may be relevant to your teaching. This saves users from having to repeat themselves over and over and makes interactions with the chatbot much more personalized. This memory can be altered according to each user’s desires and is never shared with any other users.
The ability to create images
Recent updates to ChatGPT have allowed it to create images from simple text commands or prompts. This means users can ask ChatGPT to create an image of a cartoon unicorn sitting on a blue couch, for instance, and seconds later it will respond with a new, never-seen-before image. ChatGPT is able to create such images because it has learned from images on the internet, just like it has learned from text. So when asked to create an image, it morphs together the images it has learned from to make something new.
The ability to respond to multimodal inputs
As ChatGPT has been updated, it has also been given the ability to respond to different types of questions and inputs beyond text. For example, a recent update gave ChatGPT the ability to answer questions about images and documents. Have a question about an image? Send that picture to ChatGPT, and it will tell you anything you want to know, such as what building is featured or the history behind a landmark. Don’t want to read a long document? Submit it to ChatGPT and ask for a summary. In seconds, it will provide one.
The ability to engage in vocal conversations
One recent update to ChatGPT that has excited many people is its enhanced vocal abilities. With new versions of ChatGPT, you can talk to it like you talk to a human. The voices even sound realistic, and it blows the delayed and robotic Siri away!
So to recap, ChatGPT is a chatbot that has learned from vast amounts of human work and data to respond to prompts about all sorts of topics. It continues to improve with every update, and it is becoming massively popular as a result.
THE LIMITS OF CHATGPT
Before you start jumping into ChatGPT and going crazy, it’s important to understand its limitations.
It may occasionally generate incorrect information.
ChatGPT has the potential to “hallucinate.” This happens when the bot isn’t trained sufficiently on a certain topic, so it makes up an answer. Because ChatGPT tends to write in a professional way, it’s almost impossible to distinguish these hallucinations from correct responses. For this reason, it’s important to double check what ChatGPT tells you, especially about sensitive and important topics.
The answers may be biased.
Remember, ChatGPT is trained on existing human writing and work. This means that the answers ChatGPT gives to your questions are going to be based on the human content it is trained on. Because much of this content is biased and opinionated, the chatbot may reflect some of those biases. This is another reason to take ChatGPT’s responses to sensitive content, in particular, with a grain of salt.
ChatGPT often cannot cite its sources accurately.
If you ask ChatGPT to tell you where it got its information from, it will often refer to a source that does not reflect that information. OpenAI is hoping to improve this in the future, but for now the citing of sources is generally unreliable.
ChatGPT is accused of using copyrighted material.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been facing lawsuit after lawsuit for training this chatbot on copyrighted material without proper consent or providing any sort of compensation to the humans who created the original work. This means that much of what ChatGPT produces might best be regarded not as new material but as a conglomeration of the hard work done by humans.
OpenAI may use your data to train ChatGPT.
While OpenAI does not openly seek out data from users, any information shared with ChatGPT can be used by OpenAI to make the model better at understanding human language and how to respond to it. To protect your privacy, this data is not shared with other users.
It’s important to recognize these potential shortcomings of ChatGPT before you begin using the technology, but if these features are understood in a healthy way, OpenAI’s popular chatbot can be a beacon of usefulness.
READY TO TRY CHATGPT?
Now that you have a better grasp on ChatGPT, are you ready to try it? It’s free and easy to use! To engage with this AI system, all you have to do is:
Visit the website: https://chatgpt.com/.
Sign up with your email.
Chat with ChatGPT!
Message ChatGPT about anything you would like! Ask a question about history, get life advice, or create an image of your favorite animal—ChatGPT will help you with any of those tasks, and make life just a little bit easier (and more fun).
After filling out the poll below, let us know about your ChatGPT experience in a comment!
*Disclaimer: We do not receive any compensation for mentioning OpenAI or ChatGPT. We just want to keep you informed about the biggest developments in the AI space.*
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