My Fascination with ChatGPT
Several weeks ago while visiting my son, Brett (a senior at U of A), I was briefly educated on the new ChatGPT chatbot (a computer program built to simulate conversation with humans, mainly over the internet). I was with a college friend of mine who has been a private school teacher for the last 30 years…he and Brett were telling me all about the chatbot’s capabilities and how it is going to change our world as we know it. Since that encounter, ChatGPT has been a topic of discussion on no less than four of my regular podcasts. Kim Lear, who I previously wrote about in this space (Finer Things - June 2021), authors one of my favorite newsletters and she dedicated her entire last issue to the topic.
Launched late in 2022, ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by Open AI, a private company out of San Francisco. You can get the answer to almost any question from ChatGPT by simply signing into their portal and raising your query…within seconds, you typically receive a reasonably reliable response. It may not be perfect, but considering the vast universe of data that is mined to generate the response in such a short amount of time, it is nothing short of impressive. The service is currently free, but there are likely plans to monetize it later. Right now, the company is encouraging users to simply utilize ChatGPT so it can get feedback and learn about its strengths and weaknesses.
The applications for this technology are nearly limitless. College students are using it to draft essays without getting accused of plagiarism. It can plan a trip, give you recipes and do an unbelievable amount of tasks that are mostly accurate (it does struggle with very current events). ChatGPT has instantly found use cases, most notably at the high school and college level as students begin to experiment with it to help them complete (or cheat on) their assignments. We would be shortsighted to dismiss this development as a temporary trend or fad. This iteration of the chatbot was born from a well-established Silicon Valley figure. Not to mention that some of the most metamorphic technologies at first appear as mere novelties with limited expectations around longevity. If millions of young people start using this technology in their everyday lives over the next 12 to 24 months, this behavior will become habitual in nature with long-term implications around how they grow and navigate adulthood and the responsibilities associated with it.
Microsoft has since announced improvements to their Bing search engine which includes their version of a chatbot. With ChatGPT or Bing’s chatbot, this innovative technology offers users very specific answers and detailed responses. This is in stark contrast to the sponsored blue links you receive when performing a Google search, which requires you to click on the respective link(s) to dive deeper into the subject for more clarity and insight. This natural evolution of technology is obviously a threat to Google’s dominance over the search engine market. I suspect the efficiency it offers users paired with its increasing accuracy of responses as it “learns on the job” will be a game changer for how we search, how we prefer to receive information and how sponsors and advertisers attract our attention.
Most every company in any industry will be affected by this technology…every major corporation and organization in the world will spend 2023 coming up with its AI strategy. The arrival of this particular chatbot (ChatGPT) was like the detonation of a nuclear bomb. I believe that nothing is going to be the same in its aftermath.
When I started in this industry in 1992, clients could not access their accounts via the internet. I remember my first tutorial about internet access for clients and all the information they were now going to have at their fingertips instead of us advisors controlling the flow of information. I realize this is hard to imagine in this day and age. But I think we are experiencing something just as transformative and I am very curious about how this technology will change our everyday lives.
Below are links to two recent articles related to this topic which I thought you might find interesting.
- All My Classes Suddenly Became AI: A college professor intuitively asks the question, “If I can’t beat this thing, how can I use it productively?”
- ChatGPT Goes to Law School: University of Minnesota Law School researchers used ChatGPT to generate written answers (multiple choice and essay-style responses) on real law school exams and blindly graded them alongside real law students…ChatGPT got a C+!
-Gary Weiss, March 2023
