What is the hype about a new chatbot? What is a chatbot? How is it different from personal assistants Siri or Alexa? Chatbot is indeed a personal assistant and more. Is it taking us closer to strong AI? Like a personal assistant, it does answer our questions and is there at our command to assist us at all times. It does not just answer our questions but is able to strike and hold us in conversation. It is cost-effective and low-resource based. But is based into deep learning and keeps learning on the go. Such an adaptive and learning personal assistant is a great asset.
Some say that ChatGPT will soon outsmart human communication. Right now chatbots are already successfully put into operation by several business houses. ChatGTP has opened doors for faster and smarter customer doors solutions. Some say that now that this chatbot somewhat mimics human creativity, it will soon take away human jobs. Thus it has taken our imagination captive and is taking the internet by storm. It is developed by OpenAI, a company that is linked to billionaire Elon Mask. The San Francisco-based company launched its chatbot for public testing and a million of people have come forward to interact with it. You can register on openai.com and access it. For now it is free. You can have your account for free. It is benifitting with your engagement and growing dynamically. We seem to be facing AGI (artificial general intelligence) or smart intelligence. Joining it they say you join the future in the making.
OpenAI tells us that its ChatGPT is trained by a machine learning technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). This promises that in theory it will come accurately close to simulating dialogue through things like answering follow-up questions, admitting mistakes, challenging incorrect premises and rejecting in appropriate requests. The version of the bot that is available for public testing attempts to understand questions posed by users and responds with in-depth answers resembling human written texts in a conversational format. It not seemly statically parroting answers but is dynamically learning with each interaction that it makes with humans and gets better. Therefore, it has several applications like digital marketing, online content creation, answer online customer queries and as some have already found, it can help debug code.
Given all its potentials, it smartness may still sound idiotic as human language is complex and cannot be simply mimiced as we even change the sense of a single word with our intonation and gestures. Hence, it has been found that it sometimes offered plausible sounding but incorrect or non-sensical answers. As with AI in general, it will also embed human biases and can become an eco-chamber for racism, casteism, terrorism, gender bias and the like. Tech giants like google and amazon have acknowledged that some of their projects that experimented with AI were ethically dicey and had limitations.
But the fact that it show real potential of conducting dynamic conversations and not merely parrot answers available on the net shows that it has a bright future. It can truly become a personal assistant that may be used to create robots that will give care to the old, sick and the lonely. When it comes to the job scenario, it may take us the all human secretarial task, HR management, medical doctors. Software developers. Music composers, artists, writers etc. Its dynamic learning ability and accurate memory will enable it to replace most middle men. Elon Mask had earlier understood its potential and had tweeted saying that it is a scary good. It is good but a scary one. It is a mixed bag. We cannot simply reject this growing technology. One thing good about it is that is open to all who are digitally literate. But given the digital divide it can become tool in the hand on an elite who can treat the digital illiterate as ahistorical and non-existing humans. Hence, without rejecting its creative and benovelent aspects we need to work hard at how we can inscribe ethics in its use so that it can truly become a smart assistant to us humans. Like all technology, it is a good servant but a bad master.