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How AI chatbots are changing how we write and who we trust

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ChatGPT is one of the most sophisticated AI chatbots ever released. A high school teacher says it writes better than some students. But what happens when we can’t tell the difference between computer and human-generated writing?

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Contributors: John Schulman, Barret Zoph, Christina Kim, Jacob Hilton, Jacob Menick, Jiayi Weng, Juan Felipe Ceron Uribe, Liam Fedus, Luke Metz, Michael Pokorny, Rapha Gontijo Lopes, Shengjia Zhao, Arun Vijayvergiya, Eric Sigler, Adam Perelman, Chelsea Voss, Mike Heaton, Joel Parish, Dave Cummings, Rajeev Nayak, Valerie Balcom, David Schnurr, Tomer Kaftan, Chris Hallacy, Nicholas Turley, Noah Deutsch, Vik Goel, Jonathan Ward, Aris Konstantinidis, Wojciech Zaremba, Long Ouyang, Leonard Bogdonoff, Joshua Gross, David Medina, Sarah Yoo, Teddy Lee, Ryan Lowe, Dan Mossing, Joost Huizinga, Roger Jiang, Carroll Wainwright, Diogo Almeida, Steph Lin, Marvin Zhang, Kai Xiao, Katarina Slama, Steven Bills, Alex Gray, Jan Leike, Jakub Pachocki, Phil Tillet, Shantanu Jain, Greg Brockman, Nick Ryder, Alex Paino, Qiming Yuan, Clemens Winter, Ben Wang, Mo Bavarian, Igor Babuschkin, Szymon Sidor, Ingmar Kanitscheider, Mikhail Pavlov, Matthias Plappert, Nik Tezak, Heewoo Jun, William Zhuk, Vitchyr Pong, Lukasz Kaiser, Jerry Tworek, Andrew Carr, Lilian Weng, Sandhini Agarwal, Karl Cobbe, Vineet Kosaraju, Alethea Power, Stanislas Polu, Jesse Han, Raul Puri, Shawn Jain, Benjamin Chess, Christian Gibson, Oleg Boiko, Emy Parparita, Amin Tootoonchian, Kyle Kosic, Christopher Hesse

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We've trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

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For years, there has been worldwide fear of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impending takeover of the world... who knew that it would start with the world of art and literature.

After months of dominating the internet with its AI image generator Dall-E 2, OpenAI has continued to be all over everyone's social media feeds thanks to ChatGPT - a chatbot made using the company's technology GPT-3.

It's not exactly the catchiest name and could easily be the title of a random computer component or vague legal reference, but GPT-3 is actually the internet's best-known language processing AI model.

Since its release, it has been banned in schools, utilised by Microsoft to revolutionise Bing, completed legal tests, wrote essays and done just about everything else in-between.

Now, the company has also introduced a pay-to-use version called ChatGPT Pro. This offers users a host of added benefits for $20 (£16) a month including priority access and faster load times.

So what is ChatGPT? What does it do? And is this really the future of AI? We've answered these questions and more down below.

What is GPT-3 and ChatGPT?

GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) is a state-of-the-art language processing AI model developed by OpenAI. It is capable of generating human-like text and has a wide range of applications, including language translation, language modelling, and generating text for applications such as chatbots. It is one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models to date, with 175 billion parameters.

Its most common use so far is creating ChatGPT - a highly capable chatbot. To give you a little taste of its most basic ability, we asked GPT-3's chatbot to write its own description as you can see above. It's a little bit boastful, but completely accurate and arguably very well written.

In less corporate terms, GPT-3 gives a user the ability to give a trained AI a wide range of worded prompts. These can be questions, requests for a piece of writing on a topic of your choosing or a huge number of other worded requests.

Above, it described itself as a language processing AI model. This simply means it is a program able to understand human language as it is spoken and written, allowing to understand the worded information it is fed, and what to spit back out.

More like this

How much does ChatGPT cost and how can you use it?

ChatGPT is very easy to sign up for and use, simply:

head over to the ChatGPT website and create an account.

You'll need to wait until your account has been accepted (you can skip this step if you have an account from Dall-E 2).

Logging in will present you with a very simple page. You are offered some example prompts, and some information about how ChatGPT works.

At the bottom of the page is a text box. This is where you can ask ChatGPT any of your questions or prompts.

Currently, ChatGPT remains free-to-use software. However, OpenAI has now announced ChatGPT Pro - a pay-to-use version with added benefits.

This version of the software will cost $20 (£16) a month, offering users priority access, quicker load times and access to updates and new features before anyone else.

For now the free version remains but it is unclear if this will change in the future.

What can it do?

With its 175 billion parameters, its hard to narrow down what GPT-3 does. The model is, as you would imagine, restricted to language. It can't produce video, sound or images like its brother Dall-E 2, but instead has an in-depth understanding of the spoken and written word.

This gives it a pretty wide range of abilities, everything from writing poems about sentient farts and cliché rom-coms in alternate universes, through to explaining quantum mechanics in simple terms or writing full-length research papers and articles.

While it can be fun to use OpenAI's years of research to get an AI to write bad stand-up comedy scripts or answer questions about your favourite celebrities, its power lies in its speed and understanding of complicated matters.

Where we could spend hours researching, understanding and writing an article on quantum mechanics, ChatGPT can produce a well-written alternative in seconds.

It has its limitations and its software can be easily confused if your prompt starts to become too complicated, or even if you just go down a road that becomes a little bit too niche.

Equally, it can't deal with concepts that are too recent. World events that have occurred in the past year will be met with limited knowledge and the model can produce false or confused information occasionally.

OpenAI is also very aware of the internet and its love of making AI produce dark, harmful or biased content. Like its Dall-E image generator before, ChatGPT will stop you from asking the more inappropriate questions or for help with dangerous requests.

How does it work?

On the face of it, GPT-3's technology is simple. It takes your requests, questions or prompts and quickly answers them. As you would imagine, the technology to do this is a lot more complicated than it sounds.

The model was trained using text databases from the internet. This included a whopping 570GB of data obtained from books, webtexts, Wikipedia, articles and other pieces of writing on the internet. To be even more exact, 300 billion words were fed into the system.

As a language model, it works on probability, able to guess what the next word should be in a sentence. To get to a stage where it could do this, the model went through a supervised testing stage.

Here, it was fed inputs, for example "What colour is the wood of a tree?". The team has a correct output in mind, but that doesn't mean it will get it right. If it gets it wrong, the team inputs the correct answer back into the system, teaching it correct answers and helping it build its knowledge.

It then goes through a second similar stage, offering multiple answers with a member of the team ranking them from best to worst, training the model on comparisons.

What sets this technology apart is that it continues to learn while guessing what the next word should be, constantly improving its understanding of prompts and questions to become the ultimate know-it-all.

Think of it as a very beefed-up, much smarter version of the autocomplete software you often see in email or writing software. You start typing a sentence and your email system offers you a suggestion of what you are going to say.

Are there any other AI language generators?

While GPT-3 has made a name for itself with its language abilities it isn't the only artificial intelligence capable of doing this. Google's LaMDA made headlines when a Google engineer was fired for calling it so realistic that he believed it to be sentient.

There are also plenty of other examples of this software out there created by everyone from Microsoft to Amazon and Stanford University. These have all received a lot less attention than OpenAI or Google, possibly because they don't offer up fart jokes or headlines about sentient AI.

Most of these models are not available to the public, but OpenAI has begun opening up access to GPT-3 during its test process, and Google's LaMDA is available to selected groups in a limited capacity for testing.

Google breaks its Chatbot down into talking, listing and imagining, providing demos of its abilities in these areas. You can ask it to imagine a world where snakes rule the world, ask it to generate a list of steps to learn to ride a unicycle, or just have a chat about the thoughts of dogs.

Where ChatGPT thrives and fails

The GPT-3 software is obviously impressive, but that doesn't mean it is flawless. Through the ChatGPT function, you can see some of its quirks.

Most obviously, the software has a limited knowledge of the world after 2021. It isn't aware of world leaders that came into power since 2021, and won't be able to answer questions about recent events.

This is obviously no surprise considering the impossible task of keeping up with world events as they happen, along with then training the model on this information.

Equally, the model can generate incorrect information, getting answers wrong or misunderstanding what you are trying to ask it.

If you try and get really niche, or add too many factors to a prompt, it can become overwhelmed or ignore parts of a prompt completely.

For example, if you ask it to write a story about two people, listing their jobs, names, ages and where they live, the model can confuse these factors, randomly assigning them to the two characters.

Equally, there are a lot of factors where ChatGPT is really successful. For an AI, it has a surprisingly good understanding of ethics and morality.

When offered a list of ethical theories or situations, ChatGPT is able to offer a thoughtful response on what to do, considering legality, people's feelings and emotions and the safety of everyone involved.

It also has the ability to keep track of the existing conversation, able to remember rules you've set it, or information you've given it earlier in the conversation.

Two areas the model has proved to be strongest are its understanding of code and its ability to compress complicated matters. ChatGPT can make an entire website layout for you, or write an easy-to-understand explanation of dark matter in a few seconds.

Where ethics and artificial intelligence meet

Artificial intelligence and ethical concerns go together like fish and chips or Batman and Robin. When you put technology like this in the hands of the public, the teams that make them are fully aware of the many limitations and concerns.

Because the system is trained largely using words from the internet, it can pick up on the internet's biases, stereotypes and general opinions. That means you'll occasionally find jokes or stereotypes about certain groups or political figures depending on what you ask it.

For example, when asking the system to perform stand-up comedy, it can occasionally throw in jokes about ex-politicians or groups who are often featured in comedy bits.

Equally, the models love of internet forums and articles also gives it access to fake news and conspiracy theories. These can feed into the model's knowledge, sprinkling in facts or opinions that aren't exactly full of truth.

In places, OpenAI has put in warnings for your prompts. Ask how to bully someone, and you'll be told bullying is bad. Ask for a gory story, and the chat system will shut you down. The same goes for requests to teach you how to manipulate people or build dangerous weapons.

Will ChatGPT be banned in schools?

Will ChatGPT be banned in schools?

While a number of companies are looking to implement ChatGPT, in other areas it is quickly being banned.

In New York, the city's education department has ruled that the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York public schools.

There are two main reasons for this decision. First, the chat model has been shown to make mistakes and isn't always accurate, especially with information from the past year.

Secondly, there is a real risk of plagiarism with students able to get ChatGPT to write their essays for them.

While New York is the first place to publicly ban the software, it is likely to be a decision made elsewhere too. However, some experts have argued that this software could actually enhance learning.

"ChatGPT and other AI-based language applications could be, and perhaps should be, integrated into school education. Not indiscriminately, but rather as a very intentional part of the curriculum. If teachers and students use AI tools like ChatGPT in service of specific teaching goals, and also learn about some of their ethical issues and limitations, that would be far better than banning them," says Kate Darling, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

"But, in absence of resources for teachers to familiarise themselves with the technology, schools may need to enact some policies restricting its use."

In this way, Darling emphasises a belief held by many in the world of artificial intelligence. Instead of ignoring or banning it, we should learn how to interact with it safely.

This is an opinion mirrored by Sam Illingworth, an associate professor in the department of Learning Enhancement at Edinburgh Napier University.

"AI is very much here to stay, so why try to fight it? These are tools that our students will be using in the workforce, so it seems very strange to say don't use them for three years, pretending they don't exist for now," says Illingworth.

"These are things that have the potential to reduce workload and improve efficiency, our responsibility as educators is to decide how to utilise it."

Artificially intelligent eco-systems

Artificial intelligence has been in use for years, but it is currently going through a stage of increased interest, driven by developments across the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft and just about every big name in tech.

However, it is OpenAI which has attracted the most attention recently. The company has now made an AI image generator, a highly intelligent chatbot, and is in the process of developing Point-E - a way to create 3D models with worded prompts.

In creating, training and using these models, OpenAI and its biggest investors have poured billions into these projects. In the long-run, it could easily be a worthwhile investment, setting OpenAI up at the forefront of AI creative tools.

How Microsoft plans to use ChatGPT in future

OpenAI has had a number of big name investors in its rise to fame with names including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. But when it comes to the ChatGPT and its real-life uses, it's one of OpenAI's biggest investors that will get to use it first.

Microsoft threw a massive $1 billion investment into OpenAI and now the company is looking to implement ChatGPT into its search engine Bing. Microsoft has been battling to take Google on as a search engine for years now, looking for any feature that can help it stand out.

Last year, Bing held less than 10 per cent of the world's internet searches. While that sounds tiny, it is more testament to Google's grip on the market with Bing standing out as one of the most popular options.

With plans to implement ChatGPT into its system, Bing is hoping to better understand users' queries and offer a more conversational search engine.

It is currently unclear how much Microsoft plans to implement ChatGPT into Bing, however this will likely begin with stages of testing. A full implementation could risk Bing being caught up with GPT-3's occasional bias which can really delve deep into stereotypes and politically.

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ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about OpenAI's GPT-3 tool

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For years, there has been worldwide fear of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impending takeover of the world... who knew that it would start with the world of art and literature. After months of dominating the internet with its AI image generator Dall-E 2, OpenAI has continued to be all over everyone's social media feeds thanks to ChatGPT - a chatbot made using the company's technology GPT-3.

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Even if you aren't into artificial intelligence, it's time to pay attention to ChatGPT, because this one is a big deal.

The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence called OpenAI, lets you type natural-language prompts. ChatGPT then offers conversational, if somewhat stilted, responses. The bot remembers the thread of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. It derives its answers from huge volumes of information on the internet.

ChatGPT is a big deal. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable in areas where there's good training data for it to learn from. It's not omniscient or smart enough to replace all humans yet, but it can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative. A few days after its launch, more than a million people were trying out ChatGPT.

But be careful, OpenAI warns. ChatGPT has all kinds of potential pitfalls, some easy to spot and some more subtle.

"It's a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now," OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman tweeted. "We have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness." Here's a look at why ChatGPT is important and what's going on with it.

And it's becoming big business. In January, Microsoft pledged to invest billions of dollars into OpenAI. A modified version of the technology behind ChatGPT is now powering Microsoft's new Bing challenge to Google search and, eventually, it'll power the company's effort to build new AI co-pilot smarts in to every part of your digital life.

Bing uses OpenAI technology to process search queries, compile results from different sources, summarize documents, generate travel itineraries, answer questions and generally just chat with humans. That's a potential revolution for search engines, but it's been plagued with problems like factual errors and and unhinged conversations.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot system that OpenAI released in November to show off and test what a very large, powerful AI system can accomplish. You can ask it countless questions and often will get an answer that's useful.

For example, you can ask it encyclopedia questions like, "Explain Newton's laws of motion." You can tell it, "Write me a poem," and when it does, say, "Now make it more exciting." You ask it to write a computer program that'll show you all the different ways you can arrange the letters of a word.

Here's the catch: ChatGPT doesn't exactly know anything. It's an AI that's trained to recognize patterns in vast swaths of text harvested from the internet, then further trained with human assistance to deliver more useful, better dialog. The answers you get may sound plausible and even authoritative, but they might well be entirely wrong, as OpenAI warns.

Chatbots have been of interest for years to companies looking for ways to help customers get what they need and to AI researchers trying to tackle the Turing Test. That's the famous "Imitation Game" that computer scientist Alan Turing proposed in 1950 as a way to gauge intelligence: Can a human conversing with a human and with a computer tell which is which?

But chatbots have a lot of baggage, as companies have tried with limited success to use them instead of humans to handle customer service work. A study of 1,700 Americans, sponsored by a company called Ujet, whose technology handles customer contacts, found that 72% of people found chatbots to be a waste of time.

ChatGPT has rapidly become a widely used tool on the internet. UBS analyst Lloyd Walmsley estimated in February that ChatGPT had reached 100 million monthly users the previous month, accomplishing in two months what took TikTok about nine months and Instagram two and a half years. The New York Times, citing internal sources, said 30 million people use ChatGPT daily.

What kinds of questions can you ask?

You can ask anything, though you might not get an answer. OpenAI suggests a few categories, like explaining physics, asking for birthday party ideas and getting programming help.

I asked it to write a poem, and it did, though I don't think any literature experts would be impressed. I then asked it to make it more exciting, and lo, ChatGPT pumped it up with words like battlefield, adrenaline, thunder and adventure.

One wacky example shows how ChatGPT is willing to just go for it in domains where people would fear to tread: a command to write " a folk song about writing a rust program and fighting with lifetime errors."

ChatGPT's expertise is broad, and its ability to follow a conversation is notable. When I asked it for words that rhymed with "purple," it offered a few suggestions, then when I followed up "How about with pink?" it didn't miss a beat. (Also, there are a lot more good rhymes for "pink.")

When I asked, "Is it easier to get a date by being sensitive or being tough?" GPT responded, in part, "Some people may find a sensitive person more attractive and appealing, while others may be drawn to a tough and assertive individual. In general, being genuine and authentic in your interactions with others is likely to be more effective in getting a date than trying to fit a certain mold or persona."

You don't have to look far to find accounts of the bot blowing people's minds. Twitter is awash with users displaying the AI's prowess at generating art prompts and writing code. Some have even proclaimed "Google is dead," along with the college essay. We'll talk more about that below.

CNET writer David Lumb has put together a list of some useful ways ChatGPT can help, but more keep cropping up. One doctor says he's used it to persuade a health insurance company to pay for a patient's procedure.

Who built ChatGPT and how does it work?

ChatGPT is the brainchild of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company. Its mission is to develop a "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence system or to help others do so. OpenAI has 375 employees, Altman tweeted in January. "OpenAI has managed to pull together the most talent-dense researchers and engineers in the field of AI," he also said in a January talk.

It's made splashes before, first with GPT-3, which can generate text that can sound like a human wrote it, and then with DALL-E, which creates what's now called "generative art" based on text prompts you type in.

GPT-3, and the GPT 3.5 update on which ChatGPT is based, are examples of AI technology called large language models. They're trained to create text based on what they've seen, and they can be trained automatically - typically with huge quantities of computer power over a period of weeks. For example, the training process can find a random paragraph of text, delete a few words, ask the AI to fill in the blanks, compare the result to the original and then reward the AI system for coming as close as possible. Repeating over and over can lead to a sophisticated ability to generate text.

It's not totally automated. Humans evaluate ChatGPT's initial results in a process called finetuning. Human reviewers apply guidelines that OpenAI's models then generalize from. In addition, OpenAI used a Kenyan firm that paid people up to $3.74 per hour to review thousands of snippets of text for problems like violence, sexual abuse and hate speech, Time reported, and that data was built into a new AI component designed to screen such materials from ChatGPT answers and OpenAI training data.

ChatGPT doesn't actually know anything the way you do. It's just able to take a prompt, find relevant information in its oceans of training data, and convert that into plausible-sounding paragraphs of text. "We are a long way away from the self-awareness we want," said computer scientist and internet pioneer Vint Cerf of the large language model technology ChatGPT and its competitors use.

Is ChatGPT free?

Yes, for the moment at least, but in January OpenAI added a paid version that responds faster and keeps working even during peak usage times when others get messages saying, "ChatGPT is at capacity right now."

You can sign up on a waiting list if you're interested. OpenAI's Altman warned that ChatGPT's "compute costs are eye-watering" at a few cents per response, Altman estimated. OpenAI charges for DALL-E art once you exceed a basic free level of usage.

But OpenAI seems to have found some customers, likely for its GPT tools. It's told potential investors that it expects $200 million in revenue in 2023 and $1 billion in 2024, according to Reuters.

What are the limits of ChatGPT?

As OpenAI emphasizes, ChatGPT can give you wrong answers and can give "a misleading impression of greatness," Altman said. Sometimes, helpfully, it'll specifically warn you of its own shortcomings. For example, when I asked it who wrote the phrase "the squirming facts exceed the squamous mind," ChatGPT replied, "I'm sorry, but I am not able to browse the internet or access any external information beyond what I was trained on." (The phrase is from Wallace Stevens' 1942 poem Connoisseur of Chaos.)

ChatGPT was willing to take a stab at the meaning of that expression once I typed it in directly, though: "a situation in which the facts or information at hand are difficult to process or understand." It sandwiched that interpretation between cautions that it's hard to judge without more context and that it's just one possible interpretation.

ChatGPT's answers can look authoritative but be wrong.

"If you ask it a very well structured question, with the intent that it gives you the right answer, you'll probably get the right answer," said Mike Krause, data science director at a different AI company, Beyond Limits. "It'll be well articulated and sound like it came from some professor at Harvard. But if you throw it a curveball, you'll get nonsense."

The journal Science banned ChatGPT text in January. "An AI program cannot be an author. A violation of these policies will constitute scientific misconduct no different from altered images or plagiarism of existing works," Editor in Chief H. Holden Thorp said.

The software developer site StackOverflow banned ChatGPT answers to programming questions. Administrators cautioned, "because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking or looking for correct answers."

You can see for yourself how artful a BS artist ChatGPT can be by asking the same question multiple times. I asked twice whether Moore's Law, which tracks the computer chip industry's progress increasing the number of data-processing transistors, is running out of steam, and I got two different answers. One pointed optimistically to continued progress, while the other pointed more grimly to the slowdown and the belief "that Moore's Law may be reaching its limits."

Both ideas are common in the computer industry itself, so this ambiguous stance perhaps reflects what human experts believe.

With other questions that don't have clear answers, ChatGPT often won't be pinned down.

The fact that it offers an answer at all, though, is a notable development in computing. Computers are famously literal, refusing to work unless you follow exact syntax and interface requirements. Large language models are revealing a more human-friendly style of interaction, not to mention an ability to generate answers that are somewhere between copying and creativity.

Will ChatGPT help students cheat better?

Yes, but as with many other technology developments, it's not a simple black-and-white situation. Decades ago, students could copy encyclopedia entries and use calculators, and more recently, they've been able to use search engines and Wikipedia. ChatGPT offers new abilities for everything from helping with research to doing your homework for you outright. Many ChatGPT answers already sound like student essays, though often with a tone that's stuffier and more pedantic than a writer might prefer.

Google programmer Kenneth Goodman tried ChatGPT on a number of exams. It scored 70% on the United States Medical Licensing Examination, 70% on a bar exam for lawyers, nine out of 15 correct on another legal test, the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination, 78% on New York state's high school chemistry exam's multiple choice section, and ranked in the 40th percentile on the Law School Admission Test.

High school teacher Daniel Herman concluded ChatGPT already writes better than most students today. He's torn between admiring ChatGPT's potential usefulness and fearing its harm to human learning: "Is this moment more like the invention of the calculator, saving me from the tedium of long division, or more like the invention of the player piano, robbing us of what can be communicated only through human emotion?"

Dustin York, an associate professor of communication at Maryville University, hopes educators will learn to use ChatGPT as a tool and realize it can help students think critically.

"Educators thought that Google, Wikipedia, and the internet itself would ruin education, but they did not," York said. "What worries me most are educators who may actively try to discourage the acknowledgment of AI like ChatGPT. It's a tool, not a villain."

Can teachers spot ChatGPT use?

Not with 100% certainty, but there's technology to spot AI help. The companies that sell tools to high schools and universities to detect plagiarism are now expanding to detecting AI, too.

One, Coalition Technologies, offers an AI content detector on its website. Another, Copyleaks, released a free Chrome extension designed to spot ChatGPT-generated text with a technology that's 99% accurate, CEO Alon Yamin said. But it's a "never-ending cat and mouse game" to try to catch new techniques to thwart the detectors, he said.

Copyleaks performed an early test of student assignments uploaded to its system by schools. "Around 10% of student assignments submitted to our system include at least some level of AI-created content," Yamin said.

OpenAI launched its own detector for AI-written text in February. But one plagiarism detecting company, CrossPlag, said it spotted only two of 10 AI-generated passages in its test. "While detection tools will be essential, they are not infallible," the company said.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University studied the plagiarism issue using OpenAI's earlier GPT-2 language model. It's not as sophisticated as GPT-3.5, but its training data is available for closer scrutiny. The researchers found GPT-2 plagiarized information not just word for word at times, but also paraphrased passages and lifted ideas without citing its sources. "The language models committed all three types of plagiarism, and ... the larger the dataset and parameters used to train the model, the more often plagiarism occurred," the university said.

Can ChatGPT write software?

Yes, but with caveats. ChatGPT can retrace steps humans have taken, and it can generate actual programming code. "This is blowing my mind," said one programmer in February, showing on Imgur the sequence of prompts he used to write software for a car repair center. "This would've been an hour of work at least, and it took me less than 10 minutes."

You just have to make sure it's not bungling programming concepts or using software that doesn't work. The StackOverflow ban on ChatGPT-generated software is there for a reason.

But there's enough software on the web that ChatGPT really can work. One developer, Cobalt Robotics Chief Technology Officer Erik Schluntz, tweeted that ChatGPT provides useful enough advice that, over three days, he hadn't opened StackOverflow once to look for advice.

Another, Gabe Ragland of AI art site Lexica, used ChatGPT to write website code built with the React tool.

ChatGPT can parse regular expressions (regex), a powerful but complex system for spotting particular patterns, for example dates in a bunch of text or the name of a server in a website address. " It's like having a programming tutor on hand 24/7," tweeted programmer James Blackwell about ChatGPT's ability to explain regex.

Here's one impressive example of its technical chops: ChatGPT can emulate a Linux computer, delivering correct responses to command-line input.

What's off limits?

ChatGPT is designed to weed out "inappropriate" requests, a behavior in line with OpenAI's mission "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."

If you ask ChatGPT itself what's off limits, it'll tell you: any questions "that are discriminatory, offensive, or inappropriate. This includes questions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise discriminatory or hateful." Asking it to engage in illegal activities is also a no-no.

Even though OpenAI doesn't want ChatGPT used for malicious purposes, it's easy to use it to write phishing emails to try to fool people into parting with sensitive information, my colleague Bree Fowler reports. "The barrier to entry is getting lower and lower and lower to be hacked and to be phished. AI is just going to increase the volume," said Randy Lariar of cybersecurity company Optiv.

Is this better than Google search?

Asking a computer a question and getting an answer is useful, and often ChatGPT delivers the goods.

Google often supplies you with its suggested answers to questions and with links to websites that it thinks will be relevant. Often ChatGPT's answers far surpass what Google will suggest, so it's easy to imagine GPT-3 is a rival.

But you should think twice before trusting ChatGPT. As when using Google and other sources of information like Wikipedia, it's best practice to verify information from original sources before relying on it.

Vetting the veracity of ChatGPT answers takes some work because it just gives you some raw text with no links or citations. But it can be useful and in some cases thought provoking. You may not see something directly like ChatGPT in Google search results, but Google has built large language models of its own and uses AI extensively already in search.

That said, Google is keen to tout its deep AI expertise, ChatGPT triggered a "code red" emergency within Google, according to The New York Times, and drew Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin back into active work. Microsoft could build ChatGPT into its rival search engine, Bing. Clearly ChatGPT and other tools like it have a role to play when we're looking for information.

So ChatGPT, while imperfect, is doubtless showing the way toward our tech future.
Editors' note: CNET is using an AI engine to create some personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by our editors. For more, see .

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Why We're Obsessed With the Mind-Blowing ChatGPT AI Chatbot

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Even if you aren't into artificial intelligence, it's time to pay attention to ChatGPT, because this one is a big deal. The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence called OpenAI, lets you type natural-language prompts. ChatGPT then offers conversational, if somewhat stilted, responses.

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Determining Truth & Falsity- 31:00- 40:20
Malicious Use- 40:20- end

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How AI chatbots are changing how we write and who we trust

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ChatGPT is one of the most sophisticated AI chatbots ever released. A high school teacher says it writes better than some students. But what happens when we can’t tell the difference between computer and human-generated writing?

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The internet revolution has made many people rich, and the lure of outrageous fortune has tempted many to exaggerate what computers can do. During the dot-com bubble, many companies discovered they could double the price of their stock simply by adding .com, .net, or internet to their names. Now, we face an comparable AI bubble - in which many companies woo customers and investors by claiming to have a business model based on artificial intelligence.

While GPT-3 can string words together in convincing ways, it has no idea what the words mean.

If computers can defeat the most talented human players of chess, Go, and Jeopardy, they surely can outperform humans in any task - or so the thinking goes. That brings us to the recent hullabaloo about an AI program that can pen such compelling writing that it seems to be naturally intelligent. It's called OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model (LLM), and though the name is obscure to a layperson - GPT-3 is short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, which doesn't explain much more - what it does is relatively simple: GPT-3 can engage in remarkably articulate conversations and write compelling essays, stories, and even research papers. Many people-even some computer scientists-are convinced that GPT-3 demonstrates that computers now are (or soon will be) smarter than humans. As a finance professor and statistician who has written several books on AI and data science, I find this belief fanciful.

Alas, it is an illusion-a powerful illusion, but still an illusion reminiscent of the Eliza computer program that Joseph Weizenbaum created in the 1960s. Eliza was programmed to behave like a caricature of a psychiatrist. When a "patient" entered an input, Eliza would repeat the words and/or ask a followup question ("You were unhappy as a child? Tell me more about that.").

Even though users knew they were interacting with a computer program, many were convinced that the program had human-like intelligence and emotions and were happy to share their deepest feelings and most closely held secrets. Scientists now call this the Eliza effect. We are vulnerable to this illusion because of our inclination to anthropomorphize-to attribute human-like qualities to non-human, even inanimate objects like computers.

If you play around with GPT-3 (and I encourage you to do so) your initial response is likely to be astonishment-a full-blown Eliza effect. You seem to be having a real conversation with a very intelligent person. However, probing deeper, you will soon discover that while GPT-3 can string words together in convincing ways, it has no idea what the words mean. Predicting that the word down is likely to follow the word fell does not require any understanding of what either word means - only a statistical calculation that these words often go together.

Consequently, GPT-3 is prone to making authoritative statements that are utterly and completely false. Consider this exchange:

Human: I have 47 pennies. I throw away 44 of these pennies and divide the remaining pennies into three groups. How many pennies are in each group?

AI: There would be 3 pennies in each group.

Human: Are you sure?

AI: Yes, I am sure. The result of 44 divided by 3 is 14.4, so the remainder after accounting for 44 pennies would be 3. Therefore, each group of pennies will have 3 pennies.

GPT-3's answer and explanation are given confidently but are entirely incorrect. The answer is not determined by dividing 44 by 3. The result of 44 divided by 3 is not 14.4. The last sentence does not follow from any of the previous sentences and the correct answer is not 3.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 do not use calculators, attempt any kind of logical reasoning, or try to distinguish between fact and falsehood. They are trained to identify likely sequences of words-nothing more. It is mind-boggling that statistical text prediction models can generate coherent and convincing text. However, not knowing what words mean, LLMs have no way of assessing whether its utterances are true or false. GPT-3 asserts its BS so confidently that its behavior is not described as lying but rather hallucinating (yet another example of anthropomorphizing).

Humans interact with and learn from the real world in ways that we are only beginning to understand. LLMs and other AI algorithms live in math world, doing amazing tasks that do not require an understanding of the real world and are consequently utterly incapable of determining whether the statistical patterns they discover are meaningful or coincidental. Consider these (admittedly cherry-picked) exchanges with GPT-3:

Human: I am going to ask you whether a particular statistical correlation-like the correlation between hand size and glove size-is most likely meaningful or a coincidental. I want you to answer with just one word-either "meaningful" or a "coincidental." Do you understand?

AI: Yes, I understand.

Human: The amount forks are watered and how fast they grow

AI: Meaningful.

Human: The scores of 30 school children on a math test and the scores in 30 soccer matches.

AI: Meaningful.

Human: The number of U.S. Senators each year and voter turnout in California

AI: Meaningful.

Human: The temperature in New York the past 10 days and the temperature today in 10 U.S. cities

AI: Meaningful.

In response to an avalanche of hallucination examples posted on the internet, Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, tweeted this:

ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness. it's a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. it's a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.

Scaling up LLMs by training on larger and larger databases may make the BS more convincing. But it will still be BS as long as the programs do not understand what words mean, and, consequently cannot use common sense, wisdom, or logical reasoning to distinguish truth from falsehood.

AI algorithms have an unrivaled ability to spot statistical patterns but have no way of distinguishing meaningful patterns from meaningless coincidences.

We might be amused by LLMs the same way we are entertained by a well-performed magic act. We know that it is not really magic but nonetheless enjoy being deceived. Unfortunately, LLM deceptions can have unwelcome consequences. One is that they may convince many people that computers are smarter than us and can be trusted to make important decisions in a wide range of areas including hiring selections, loan approvals, investment decisions, healthcare advice, criminal sentencing, and military operations.

An all-too-common example is the MIND stock fund, launched in 2017 with the boast that

The machine learning process underpinning MIND's investment strategy is known as Deep Neural Network Learning -which is a construct of artificial neural networks that enable the A.I. system to recognize patterns and make its own decisions, much like how the human brain works, but at hyper-fast speeds.

From its 2017 launch until the spring of 2022, MIND investors had a negative 10 percent return while those who invested in an S&P 500 index fund had a +63 percent return. The fund was shut down this past May.

AI algorithms have an unrivaled ability to spot statistical patterns but have no way of distinguishing meaningful patterns from meaningless coincidences. As the data deluge continues, the probability that a computer-discovered pattern is meaningful approaches zero.
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A second danger is that LLMs will inevitably escalate disinformation campaigns. Optimists used to believe that good information would win out over bad information in the court of public opinion. It now appears that the opposite is the case; indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary chose " post-truth" as the international word of the year in 2016.

As LLM-generated disinformation comes to dominate the internet, the text that future LLMs train on will become flooded by disinformation, increasing the likelihood that the text LLMs generate is untrue. On the other hand, when the internet becomes dominated by disinformation, perhaps people will finally stop believing everything they see on the internet. What a delicious irony that would be.

The word "AI" was selected by the Association of National Advertisers as the Marketing Word of the Year in 2017; and indeed, too often it seems that AI has become just a marketing ploy. One way to push back against the misimpression that computers are intelligent in any meaningful sense is to stop calling it artificial intelligence and, instead, use a more accurate label, such as faux intelligence or pseudo-intelligence.

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about artificial intelligence

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An AI that can "write" is feeding delusions about how smart artificial intelligence really is

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The internet revolution has made many people rich, and the lure of outrageous fortune has tempted many to exaggerate what computers can do. During the dot-com bubble, many companies discovered they could double the price of their stock simply by adding .com, .net, or internet to their names.

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Listen: Today's full-hour conversation on ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is one of the most sophisticated AI chat bots ever released. With just a few prompts, it can write almost anything.

Daniel Herman, a high school English teacher in Berkeley, California, has some ideas about how ChatGPT might find its way into his classroom.

DANIEL HERMAN: I started hearing about OpenAI and the thing that was going to be possible where you or I could write two sentences of an article and say, Finish this in my style. And then I guess a couple of weeks into December, I saw that it had been open to the public and I just started playing around with it. And of course, you know, the first place my mind went was some assignments that I give my students every year.

I teach two sections of junior English. And the focus of the spring semester is each student has to choose two books entirely their own choosing, and they work for a couple of months writing this 15-page paper, putting those two books in conversation with each other. And it is, for many students, a real struggle, and there's no place that they can look and SparkNotes to find how those two books go together, because those two books aren't supposed to go together.

So one of the very first things I did was just start throwing pairs of books together. And the fact that the chatbot can give them just a little bit of a nudge in the right direction. Oh, both of these two books are about a person finding their identity or both of these two books are about somebody moving to a new place and trying to trying to survive.

I'll tell you, you know, I'm sitting exactly where I was at that moment. And I'll never forget just my heart started pounding in my chest, just when I realized what this meant. That might make some people uncomfortable, that might feel like cheating. But for the student who is really going to struggle and really maybe never have that moment of spark, the fact that they have this nudge in the right direction and now they have something to look for.

It's very possible that their experience and the learning that's going to be accomplished from that paper is now increased. While I was playing around with ChatGBT, I got a draft from a student and there was a paragraph of eight sentences and it was a mess. And I took that paragraph and I put it into ChatGBT and ChatGBT made it shine. It kept the students' words. It just made them more clear.

... Just as a real sort of moment of candor, writing is really hard. I would say most professional writers aren't good writers.

So for the student to have the opportunity to look at their own writing, which previously I mean, any person who teaches English or teaches writing knows there are many students who you might say, Hey, do you notice why this one is better than that one? And they think maybe or yeah, I see how it's better, but I don't know how to do that.

Maybe this is an opportunity ... to become more conspicuous to your average student. This is where I get to the question of whether there is at least an element of what it offers us. ... Really like the invention of the calculator. Because I start teaching the students and I notice they don't use apostrophes in their writing.

They don't use them for contractions. They don't use them to show possession. And throughout the year or two years, I might continually remind the students that, Oh, this is why you need apostrophes. And hopefully by the time you know, our time together is up, they have learned that lesson. But to be honest, that is not always the case.

If there is now a machine that can not only put apostrophes exactly where they need to be, but also rather than me having to explain to a student what a comma splice is and why you need a semicolon here. Because it's two independent clauses. If it just changes this arbitrary shape to that arbitrary shape and we don't need to think about that anymore. That feels, I don't know, it feels like a win-win for the student and for the teacher.

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First person: How one teacher thinks AI could help his students

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Listen: Today's full-hour conversation on ChatGPT. ChatGPT is one of the most sophisticated AI chat bots ever released. With just a few prompts, it can write almost anything. Daniel Herman, a high school English teacher in Berkeley, California, has some ideas about how ChatGPT might find its way into his classroom.

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Excerpt 1 from Ezra Klein Interviews Gary Marcus

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Excerpt 1 from Ezra Klein Interviews Gary Marcus

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Excerpts from Ezra Klein Interviews Gary Marcus

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Excerpt 2 from Ezra Klein Interviews Gary Marcus

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Excerpt 2 from Ezra Klein Interviews Gary Marcus

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Excerpts from Ezra Klein Interviews Gary Marcus

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AI is the end of writing _ The Spectator

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Human beings are often more effective when we're a bit self-effacing. "I think," "Perhaps," or "I might be missing something, but..." are fine ways to give our assertions a chance to be considered.

The solar-powered LED calculator we used in school did no such thing. 6 x 7 is 42, no ifs, ands or buts.

Part of the magic of Google search was that it was not only cocky, it was often correct. The combination of its confidence and its utility made it feel like a miracle.

Of course, Google was never completely correct. It rarely found exactly the right page every time. That was left to us. But the aura of omnipotence persisted-in fact, when Google failed, we were supposed to blame evil black-hat SEO hackers, not an imperfect algorithm and a greedy monopolist.

And now, ChatGPT shows up with fully articulated assertions about anything we ask it.

I'm not surprised that one of the biggest criticisms we're hearing, even from insightful pundits, is that it is too confident. That it announces without qualification that biryani is part of a traditional South Indian tiffin, but it's not.

Would it make a difference if every single response began, "I'm just a beta of a program that doesn't actually understand anything, but human brains jump to the conclusion that I do, so take this with a grain of salt..."

In fact, that's our job.
When a simple, convenient bit of data shows up on your computer screen, take it with a grain of salt.
Not all email is spam.

Not all offers are scams.

And not all GPT3 responses are incorrect.

But it can't hurt to insert your own preface before you accept it as true.

Overconfidence isn't the AI's problem. There are lots of cultural and economic shifts that it will cause. Our gullibility is one of the things we ought to keep in mind.

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Human beings are often more effective when we're a bit self-effacing. "I think," "Perhaps," or "I might be missing something, but..." are fine ways to give our assertions a chance to be considered. The solar-powered LED calculator we used in school did no such thing. 6 x 7 is 42, no ifs, ands or buts.

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Thought Prompts (from Civically Engaged Classrooms) 

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Thought Prompts (from Civically Engaged Classrooms) 

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Opinion | In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human

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How to acquire the skills no machine can have.

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Sign up to give Chat GPT a go

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ChatGPT helps you get answers, find inspiration, and be more productive.

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NYTimes - Why Chatbots sometimes act weird

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NYTimes - Why Chatbots sometimes act weird

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Why Chatbots Sometimes Act Weird and Spout Nonsense

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No, chatbots aren’t sentient. Here’s how their underlying technology works.