Uncritical Slobbering All Over ChatGPT

NewAtlas |  OpenAI's humble, free-to-use chatbot has made it clear: life will never be the same after ChatGPT.

We are witnessing a revolution. After the stunning debut of OpenAI's Dall-E 2 image generator last year, the company opened its natural language generator up to the public at the end of November last year. Since then, it's spread like wildfire, amassing more than 100 million users in its first two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history and the buzzword of the year.

There had been thousands of AI chatbots before, but never one like this. Here was an artificial intelligence trained on hundreds of billions of words; it has read billions of books, billions of web pages, billions of Wikipedia entries – so it's ingested a broad and detailed snapshot of the entirety of human knowledge up until around June 2021, the cutoff point for the dataset on which its underlying GPT 3.5 language model has been trained. 

Beyond being handed this priceless treasure trove of knowledge, ChatGPT has been trained in the art of interaction using untold numbers of written human conversations, and guided by human supervisors to improve the quality of what it writes.

The results are staggering. ChatGPT writes as well as, or (let's face it) better than, most humans. This overgrown autocomplete button can generate authoritative-sounding prose on nearly any topic in a matter of milliseconds, of such quality that it's often extremely difficult to distinguish from a human writer. It formulates arguments that seem well-researched, and builds key points toward a conclusion. Its paragraphs feel organic, structured, logically connected and human enough to earn my grudging respect.

The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing. Clearly something big is happening.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) December 2, 2022

It remembers your entire conversation and clarifies or elaborates on points if you ask it to. And if what it writes isn't up to scratch, you can click a button for a complete re-write that'll tackle your prompt again from a fresh angle, or ask for specific changes to particular sections or approaches.

It costs you nothing. It'll write in any style you want, taking any angle you want, on nearly any topic you want, for exactly as many words as you want. It produces enormous volumes of text in seconds. It's not precious about being edited, it doesn't get sick, or need to pick its kids up from school, or try to sneak in fart jokes, or turn up to work hungover, or make publishers quietly wonder exactly how much self-pleasuring they're paying people for in a remote work model.

Little wonder that websites like CNET, Buzzfeed and others are starting the process of replacing their human writers with ChatGPT prompt-wranglers – although there's icebergs in the water for these early adopters, since the technology still gets things flat-out wrong sometimes, and sounds confident and authoritative enough in the process that even teams of fact-checking sub-editors can't stop it from publishing "rampant factual errors and apparent plagiarism," as well as outdated information.

Despite these slight drawbacks, the dollar rules supreme, and there has never been a content-hose like this before. Indeed, it seems the main thing standing between large swaths of the publishing industry and widespread instant adoption of ChatGPT as a high-volume, low-cost author is the fear that Google might figure out how to detect AI-generated text and start penalizing offenders by tanking their search ratings.

Just in case anyone's wondering, we don't use it here at New Atlas, and have no plans to start – but we'd be fools not to see the writing on the wall. This genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and it won't take long before it can fact-check itself and improve its accuracy. It's not immediately obvious how AI-generated text can reliably be detected at this point. So enjoy your local human writers while you still can ... And throw us $20 on an ad-free subscription if you want to help keep the doors open!

Its work certainly doesn't have to be dry and (seemingly) factual, either. ChatGPT has more than a passing understanding of more creative forms of writing as well, and will happily generate fiction too. It'll pump out custom bedtime stories for your kids, or complex choose-your-own-adventure experiences, or role-playing games about anything you like, or teen fiction, or screenplays, or comedy routines.