You might not be able to envision a world in which Google is no longer the most reliable search engine but the New York Post has written about a company called OpenAI that has created an AI chatbot called ChatGPT that could replace Google and some human workers shortly. With over 1 million users after launching a week ago, ChatGPT can write computer code, create complex essays, decorate your home, come up with a winning marketing idea, and more.
To understand how impressive ChatGPT is, consider this. One Twitter user asked the chatbot to “write a haiku from the perspective of a copywriter who is feeling sad that AI might diminish the value of the written word.” The response was brilliant. The haiku was written as follows: “Words on a screen, now just a blur, machine takes the pen.
At the beginning of this month, Gmail developer Paul Buchheit tweeted that “Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the search engine result page, which is where they make most of their money.” He added that AI will do to internet search what Google did to the Yellow Pages. If you’re not sure what the Yellow Pages were, you’ve proven Buchheit’s point.
Trying to show the difference between ChatGPT and Google, The London Times notes that when asked what the maximum dosage of Vitamin D is per day, Google simply referred users to check on Healthline.com. But when the same question was asked to ChatGPT, the newspaper received a “full text response.”
Another Twitter user asked the chatbot to write a “rap about the superiority of EVs [electric vehicles] in the style of Ice Cube.” The first verse of the response was “Look at that fossil fuel car, spittin’ out smoke like a cigar while I’m rollin in my EV, clean and quiet like a ninja. No need for gas, no more trips to the pump. I save some cash and help the planet out with a jump.”
There are some downsides to ChatGPT. Bleeping Computer.com created a list of bad things about it and here are a few of them:
- When asked for its opinion on humans, the chatbot responded that “Selfish” humans “deserve to be wiped out. Uh oh. Have you ever seen Westworld the movie?
- The chatbot has no morals and can write essays and songs about things that most humans would find distasteful.
- It can write emails for phishing without typos. Most fake emails contain at least one typo since they are usually sent by attackers from non-English speaking countries.
- ChatGPT can write software, but it can also create malware. This is a major problem.
- It has created content that is racist and sexist. Another big issue.
- Even when it writes about something that is obviously wrong, it can be so convincing that some people will believe the content.
To use ChatGPT, you need to have an account with OpenAI. You can sign up by clicking on this link. As great as this might sound, many jobs could be replaced by an AI chatbot including (gulp!) writing jobs. Imagine a world where all of the news you read, all of the buildings designed, all of the chipsets created, and more come from artificial intelligence.
