This AI chatbot is blowing people’s minds. Here’s what it’s been writing.
A NEW chatbot created by artificial intelligence non-profit company OpenAI has taken the Internet by storm, as users speculated on its ability to replace everything, from playwrights to college essays.
Users took to Twitter this week to share their surprise at the detailed answers the ChatGPT chatbot provided – from historical arguments to poems on cryptocurrency – after the startup sought feedback on the AI model.
OpenAI’s chief executive officer Sam Altman tweeted on Thursday that there has been “a lot more demand” than expected.
The San Francisco-based company has made headlines over its GPT-3 software, which allows AI models to respond intelligently to text prompts. Earlier this year, the second version of its DALL-E model went viral for its ability to generate photo-realistic images from user submissions.
OpenAI was co-founded by Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk and Altman, along with other investors, about seven years ago to develop AI technologies that “benefit all of humanity.” Musk left the company in 2018 after disagreements over its direction, but on Thursday, he offered an endorsement of the model’s abilities on Twitter.
Chatbot technology is not new, although its deployment has met with mixed success. Microsoft’s AI bot “Tay” was taken down in 2016 after Twitter users taught it to say racist, sexist and offensive remarks. Another AI bot developed by Meta Platforms suffered similar issues this year.
Developers have acknowledged that the model “sometimes writes plausible-sounding, but incorrect or nonsensical answers”, and can be “excessively verbose” due to the training it received from humans.
While most people were delighted with the bot’s musings, some were quick to point out flaws, such as the model giving a detailed – but incorrect – answer to a question on algebra, and its ability to override limits on output related to issues like gore, crime and racism. BLOOMBERG
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