ChatGPT – Useful Tool or Dangerous Precedent?

AI technology was a figment of speculative and science fiction for generations, but recent technological developments have brought that far-future fiction well within the realms of reality. The biggest success story of the moment is ChatGPT, a revolutionary new tool that has brought about some serious questions about AI, responsibility, and even ethics.

What is ChatGPT?

For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is a commercially accessible AI tool and one of the first AI tools to demonstrate the rich seam of possibility for future consumer products and applications. It is a language model, designed to replicate and reproduce believable “human” responses to user questions and requests.

Functionally, ChatGPT is a chatbot. But many users have been taking the algorithm further and pushing its boundaries to find new and exciting functionalities. On a base level, ChatGPT is effective at generating text that conforms to a given tone or registers; users can give it a brief and receive content that suits that brief.

The Pros and Cons of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an incredible innovation in the AI world, and proof positive of the paradigm shifts we can expect in the tech world and beyond. However, it is not without its demerits, and the widespread availability of the system is a ‘mixed bag’, so to speak. Chat GPT is extremely powerful for modelling language, and a useful tool for assisting with difficult writing or research tasks – but leaning on it can be dangerous.

On the one hand, ChatGPT succeeds surprisingly well with language-adjacent tasks, such as the solving of coding problems and the creation of simple applications from scratch. This opens up coding and coding tutelage to a far wider audience and has the potential to democratise software tech.

But many irregular users are unaware that ChatGPT is a language model, and nothing more. While it is trained on extensive tranches of human knowledge and available resources to build its ‘voices’, the information it reads is not the information it necessarily understands. It also has a tendency to invent information that fits linguistically. As such, incorrect information can easily be coaxed from it – something which poses risk when users misuse it as a “smart” search engine.

ChatGPT and Academia

This, as an issue, tracks alongside the leading debates over the role of ChatGPT and other AI solutions in today’s society. There is a concern that students will rely on ChatGPT to generate work on their behalf – work that could at once ‘spoof’ a quality assignment and serve to institutionalise subtle misconceptions from the source material. This concern has made its way to the top of higher education, with around 40% of UK universities thought to have banned ChatGPT for their cohorts.

The other side of the coin is that ChatGPT does hold some practical utility as an assistant and could be a useful resource for students if used responsibly. Add to this the fact that AI tools will only improve from here, and it seems that the tide will be impossible to stem.

As it stands, ChatGPT is at once a useful system and diverts curiosity. The work it produces is demonstrably mediocre, though undeniably meritable for its form and structure. The future it suggests, though, is both bright and concerning.

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