Is the world ready for ChatGPT?

A new figure on the horizon of language AI has been making waves in the news recently. That is the public release of super-powered chatbot ChatGPT. But what exactly does this development mean, and what can we expect from it? Here are our thoughts on the matter.

What is ChatGPT?

First of all, it’s important to understand what ChatGPT actually is. But rather than tell you ourselves, let’s outsource an explanation:

“ChatGPT is a variant of the popular language model GPT-3, specifically designed for chatbot applications. It was developed by OpenAI and released in 2022.

One of the main advantages of ChatGPT is its ability to generate human-like responses to user inputs in a conversational context. This makes it ideal for use in chatbots and other conversational AI systems, where it can provide engaging and personalized responses to user queries and requests.

One of the key features of ChatGPT is its ability to maintain context in a conversation. This means that it can understand the context in which a user's input is made, and provide a response that is relevant to the overall conversation. For example, if a user asks a chatbot about the weather in a particular city, ChatGPT can understand that the conversation is about the weather and provide a response that relates to that topic.

In addition to its ability to maintain context, ChatGPT also has a large and diverse knowledge base, which allows it to provide information and answers to a wide range of user queries. This makes it a useful tool for creating chatbots that can provide helpful and accurate information to users on a variety of topics.

Overall, ChatGPT is a powerful tool for creating chatbots and other conversational AI systems. Its ability to maintain context and provide relevant and accurate responses makes it an invaluable resource for building chatbots that can engage and assist users in a natural and human-like manner.”

Sounds fairly comprehensive, doesn’t it?

Well, what if we told you that this explanation was generated by ChatGPT itself? All we did was input the question “What is ChatGPT?”, and the chatbot generated this answer in a matter of seconds.

Users are able to chat with the machine, and the machine is able to respond in a natural-sounding manner. Not only that, the machine is able to remember previous input and use it as context for future responses, allowing for extended conversations.

But it goes beyond just conversation; ChatGPT is able to process different kinds of text-related requests. For example, if you were to ask ChatGPT to come up with interview questions on a given topic, it is capable of doing so with remarkable complexity. 

Users can ask for a wide variety of things such as ideas for a party, easy explanations about complicated concepts, and even writing poetry in the style of specific writers! The possibilities are vast.

Where have we heard this before…

If you’ve been following this blog for a while (or, at least, been keeping up with developments in language AI), then this might not be the first time you’re hearing about a large language model in the mainstream news. Indeed, there’s another super-powered chatbot that found some measure of notoriety earlier in the year—Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, with one of its engineers claiming that the language model had become sentient.

Of course, we know that’s not what happened, and the machine merely performed as it was designed, which is to mimic human dialogue; it just so happens to be really good at that.

To learn more about how it works, you can check out our blog post “Is Natural Language Processing (NLP) Taking AI Into Sci-Fi Territory?”

ChatGPT and LaMDA represent the current pinnacle of development in the field of natural language processing. However, as with all exciting innovations in technology, there are things that we need to keep in consideration about in their use.

Of the two machines, ChatGPT is the only one available for public use. That’s because Google tends to be more cautious about the potential risks that come with releasing new tech. LaMDA is capable of everything ChatGPT does, but Google has shown no signs of releasing it. This largely has to do with how conversational AI like ChatGPT and LaMDA handle risk factors such as bias and factuality. 

Because they present information in an authoritative and convincing manner, they can at times present inaccurate information with full confidence. This can catch users unaware if they are uninformed of such risks that come with using the machine.

In the case of Google, its reputation is built entirely on its authority as a leader in search, so releasing LaMDA poses a huge risk to its branding. As for ChatGPT, it comes with appropriate warnings that inform users about the risks that come with its use. Users need to be careful about how much they rely on the information that ChatGPT produces.

Can ChatGPT be used for translation?

Now that’s the million dollar question for us. Can ChatGPT be used for translation? It’s definitely something that one can ask ChatGPT to do, and receive an answer in turn, at the very least.

But for a number of people, the results have been surprising. For example, a user on Reddit shared the results of a translation between English and Papiamentu, a low-resource language spoken on the island of ‎Curaçao in the Caribbean. According to the user, the translation turned out to be surprisingly good.

Another compared the results between ChatGPT and Google Translate on three kinds of texts—jokes, social media posts, and colloquialisms—which machine translation models have tended to struggle with. The results showed remarkable fluency as well.

However, these results also highlight the hazards that we mentioned earlier. Fluency doesn’t necessarily mean accuracy, and the fact that these results look more convincing means that more care needs to be taken in using conversational AI for translation tasks.

For one, it should definitely be noted that compared with machine translation models, conversational AI tends to take more liberties with the text. This is definitely an added hazard, on top of the usual risks that come with machine translation. As such, while it is a tempting thing to do, it’s not something that we would recommend for any professional use just yet.

Takeaways

All in all, the release of ChatGPT is a major gamechanger in the field of language AI, and at the current rate of development we may expect to see a wider range of applications soon. However, we should still keep in mind that this technology is still under continuous development in terms of addressing the risks that come with it, so responsible and well-informed use should still remain at the forefront of the discussion.