Meet ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chat bot that could take your job
BALTIMORE -- ChatGPT is designed to understand and generate human-like text.
It's been trained on a massive amount of data, including books and websites.
A person can ask it questions, seek advice, or simply have a casual conversation with it.
Right now, Chat GPT—short for generative pre-trained transformer—is exploding in popularity because anyone can use it.
Also, it can answer almost any question.
For example, a person could use it to write press releases, legal briefs, or to complete homework assignments.
"You will say, 'Write an essay on the causes of the American Revolution as a freshman in college…it will do that,'" Dr. Anupam Joshi told WJZ.
Joshi is the director of the UMBC Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County.
He said in an interview this week that the ChatGPT has the ability to put many people's jobs in jeopardy, including the role of reporters.
When Joshi asked ChatGPT to write a news article about crime in Baltimore, it gave him a story that included statistics and descriptions of people's feelings.
ChatGPT even decided to add in a quote from the mayor.
"It's doing a pretty good job of being a reporter, of maybe being a professor," Joshi said. "Maybe the next thing I should do is say 'prepare a lecture on…'"
Although ChatGPT can do a lot, but it does not know everything. If you ask it about the weather in Baltimore, it will say that it does not have real-time access to current weather information.
That is because ChatGPT has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021.
And for that reason, it could generate incorrect answers.
"The ChatGPT is good, but it doesn't always get it right, and that is actually quite normal because this is relatively new, and over time, it'll actually get better and better," Dr. Dobin Yim, an assistant professor at Loyola University Maryland, said.
There is some concern that ChatGPT may produce biased content.
"The AIs could inadvertently be spewing misinformation," Morgan State University Professor Dr. Kofi Nyarko said. "It could be targeting individuals unfairly in terms of how it responds to one group versus another. Information just could not be accurate."
Tech companies are rushing to incorporate these chat models into their search engines.
So, instead of getting a list of links, a person would engage in a dialogue with the artificial intelligence bot.
Joshi predicts that experience is just a few months away.
"It's a good tool," Joshi said. "It will do some things very well. But like any tool, you have to be careful how to use it."
The company OpenAI released ChatGPT in November.
Right now, the company is doing a research preview to get user feedback. So, anyone can use ChatGPT for free.