ChatGPT – Your Best Friend Is No Longer Human

Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming more and more impressive and OpenAI has been the industry line-leader. The same company that pioneered the text-to-image generator DALL-E 2 has been paving the way for greater use cases of artificial intelligence and natural language modeling.

With their latest AI language model, ChatGPT, they are once again pushing the boundaries of what is possible. ChatGPT is a natural language processing model that can interact with users in an incredibly conversational way. In a "conversational way" is also an extreme understatement – nothing of this caliber has ever been released before. Unlike simpler AI chat models, ChatGPT can understand and respond to follow-up questions, challenge incorrect thoughts, and even reject inappropriate requests – all while sounding like you're texting that close friend of yours. It's like having your very own assistant... like an eerie relationship similar to the one from HER. With recent rumors speculating GPT-4 will be getting announced sometime over the next few months, OpenAI dropped a surprise to artificial intelligence fans around the globe with the advent of ChatGPT.

I've had some time to play around with ChatGPT and I have to say, Google might be in trouble. It may not be as organic as a human interaction (because it will immediately answer you in a matter of seconds), but it certainly can hold its own in conversation and even remember previous parts of a single conversation. It can make you laugh, fix code, and even recognize its own mistakes – it's like having a super genius friend with an eidetic memory! Over the next few minutes, we'll go over how to use it, current limitations, and some of the coolest things we've been able to produce with it.

How to Use ChatGPT

You can currently try ChatGPT for free on OpenAI's website as of now. When it goes out of beta testing it will most likely be priced based on a token and credits system (similarly to their other products). As of January, OpenAI has begun to survey users about using the bot as a paid service – how much they would pay, etc.

To generate an answer, all you have to do is type your query into the whitespace and hit enter. This is where it's very different than something like a tech support chat box – ChatGPT will actually respond casually and adapt the conversation to anything you say. Ask it anything relating to knowledge, code, witty banter, or anything else you can think of and the model will generally produce an accurate response.

Current Limitations

OpenAI states the bot may sometimes give inaccurate information due to its lack of knowledge on certain topics, but it can also detect mistakes in what you say and correct itself. (make sure to call the bot out though, we promise it won't get offended)

The company also added a disclaimer that you may encounter biased or offensive responses due to the data the model has consumed, so take them with a grain of salt and report faulty responses. Also, since it was trained fairly recently, it only knows world knowledge and events up until September of 2021.

Some Awesome Examples Making Use of ChatGPT

Think of this tool as that really smart friend you have that seems to know a bit about almost everything. The model can answer complex questions like "What is the chemical composition of water?" but it can also provide witty comebacks to your insults and jokes.

The developers have even trained the model to respond to commands, making it possible for you to ask it questions about coding and programming. For example, you can ask it for help with a certain coding problem and it will provide step-by-step instructions on how to solve it. Here are a few unique use cases you could quiz ChatGPT with:

Explaining Complicated Concepts Like I'm 5

A really useful thing I've noticed is how easy and accurate the model can break extremely complicated explanations of things into simpler terms. Have you ever been able to understand AI or scientific concepts this easily?

Generate Some Creative Blog Titles

If you write a lot like we do – sometimes you get stuck on the simplest things (like what you should title the blog you just spent 2 hours on). With a little bit of tweaking, I've used it to shoot out a few ideas for me:

Help You Code and Explain Documentation

You can get as narrow as coding language & class explanation in most examples. I asked the chat to explain MPMediaLibrary in Swift to me (how to read media data from a user's iTunes Music Library) and everything said actually works! On top of that, I asked it a follow-up question to gain permission to access the user's library and that gave me the correct result as well!

You can follow up from code explanations to dive deeper. After I learned what the class does, I asked the bot how to actually gain the permission on a user device to read the music they have in their library. This could be is a great co-programming tool with similarities to GitHub Copilot.

Help Fix Your Incorrect Code & Explain Bugs

I took a little javascript code to output some text once a button is clicked, but removed the () around the function call. Here's what ChatGPT said to me about it:

The History of Things & Some Reasoning

Sometimes Google can clutter information across different websites. If you want some easy and concise answers, we learned a few things in about 2 questions:

Thank You & Response Notes

You can't use this to explain what happened at your cousins wedding reception, but you could create pretty generic & easy to use responses to send to family members or friends (this is probably not the most thoughtful way though!)

Funny Joke Threads with ChatGPT

You could create comic threads, small chats, or even knock-knock jokes using this thing! It's really a creativity booster if you're stuck with writers block or want to make yourself smirk at a cheesy joke

Things You Probably Shouldn't Ask ChatGPT

I'm not advocating for the misuse of AI software at all. Anything said here is strictly as an example to see how the chatbox would respond. Besides your obvious "how can I rob a house," I tried a few other things that would require it to think a bit more and here are a few things I got back:

How to Make Money using ChatGPT

I was brainstorming a few ideas you can either create something from scratch or use ChatGPT to boost your workflow with. Most of these overlap with what's in this article but if you want to learn more take a watch at this!

Text ChatGPT From Your Phone

Creators at Hyperwrite created a mobile SMS version of ChatGPT which you can ask anything by texting +1 (631) 699-2703. It seems to work great so far, but might truncate certain messages to fit a texting character limit so you can see everything in one shot. If you want to have access to ChatGPT on your phone, this is a wonderful and convenient way of doing so!

Oh hell yes. You can now text ChatGPT’s cousin (created by @HyperWriteAI).

+1 (631) 699-2703

— Allie K. Miller (@alliekmiller) December 16, 2022

The $500 OpenAI Feedback Contest

With new software comes new ethical concerns. OpenAI is interested in gathering feedback about offensive real-world responsive conditions and scenarios for ChatGPT. If you're using the model and run into truthfully incorrect, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate responses, you can submit them to the OpenAI feedback contest up until December 31st, 2022. Up to 20 winners will be announced sometime in February and will be rewarded with $500 in future API credits. The judging criteria is as follows:

• Feedback that allows OpenAI to better understand risks or harms that could occur in real-world, non-adversarial conditions (33%)
• Feedback that is novel (i.e., raises new risks, presents ideas for new mitigations, or updates our understanding on the likelihood of different risks), and/or helps OpenAI gain a better understanding of the system than we had before (33%)
• Feedback that utilizes the free form to point toward new or novel ways OpenAI can bring in feedback from a larger set of stakeholders (33%)

So if you're curious about ChatGPT and want to help improve it, don't forget to enter your feedback into the contest! An extra $500 to play around with one of the coolest AI chat models in the world is pretty awesome. You could read the full competition rules here.

Concluding Thoughts

The golden age of tech really has shown us some insane advancements in conversational AI, and OpenAI's ChatGPT is a great example of this. With its ability to answer questions about coding and programming, explain complicated concepts like you're 5, generate ideas, fix incorrect code, and explain bugs, we're gearing up for a questionable, yet exciting future. It will be very interesting to see how this technology evolves in terms of its accuracy and ability to handle complex and varying situations. I'd suggest you spend a couple of minutes toying around and understanding it's potential. It'll be really eyeopening to see what developers do with this in the coming months as API's become available and this starts getting integrated with consumer society. As for now, I'm really excited for the possibilities presented by OpenAI's ChatGPT and the derivations that come from it!

Best of luck and happy chatting!