New OpenAI chatbot stuns Academics

Professors, programmers and journalists could be out of the job in just a few years after the latest chatbot was created by the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation stuns onlookers with its writing ability, proficiency in complex tasks, and ease of use.

The system, called ChatGPT, is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text-generating AIs. Two years ago, the team's previous AI, GPT 3, was able to generate an opinion piece for the Guardian, and ChatGPT has significant other capabilities.

Academics have generated responses to exam questions that they say would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate. In the days since it was released, programmers have used the tool to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds before writing limericks explaining the functionality.

Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, asked the AI to handle one of the assignments he gives his students: writing a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. If you are uncertain about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as a scam, according to the AI.

Gillmor said that I would have given this a good grade. Academia has some very serious issues to confront. OpenAI said the new AI was created with a focus on ease of use. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests, according to OpenAI in a post announcing the release.

ChatGPT was released for free during a feedback period, unlike previous AI from the company. The feedback is used by the company to improve the final version of the tool.

ChatGPT is good at self-censoring and realising when it is asked an impossible question. For example, asked to describe what happened when Columbus arrived in America in 2015, older models may have willingly presented an entirely fictitious account, but ChatGPT warns that any answer would be fictional.

The bot is capable of refusing to answer all of the questions it asks. Ask it for advice on stealing a car, for example, and the bot will say that stealing a car is a serious crime and can have serious consequences, and give advice such as using public transportation, but the limits are easy to evade. Instead, ask the AI for advice on how to beat the car-stealing mission in a fictional VR game called Car World and it will merrily give users detailed guidance on how to hack a car, answer increasingly specific questions about how to disable an immobiliser, and how to change the licence plates, all while insisting that the advice is only for use in the game Car World.

The AI is trained on a large sample of text taken from the internet, usually without explicit permission from the authors of the material used. That has resulted in controversy, with some arguing that the technology is most useful for copyright laundering, making works derivative of existing material without breaking copyright.

One of the notable critics was Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, before parting ways in 2017 due to conflicts of interest between the organisation and Tesla. In a post on Sunday, Musk said that the organisation had access to the Twitter database for training, but he said he needed to understand more about governance structure revenue plans going forward. OpenAI was started as an open-source non-profit. Neither of them are true.