What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT has been at the forefront of many conversations over the past couple of months. With buzzwords like “industry-killer” and “AI” being thrown around, it’s easy to get confused as to what it actually is.

In its own words, ChatGPT is “an AI language model developed by OpenAI, based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) architecture and is trained on a large corpus of text data, including websites, books, and other written materials.”

Essentially, ChatGPT is a program that you can feed data into and specify an outcome. It will then trawl its massive database to find a relevant result.

This has the potential to be extremely powerful, as having an AI bot at your disposal to assist with difficult questions can drastically speed up your process time, potentially saving you significant time during your day.

How ChatGPT (and other AI tools) can be used in day to day work

While not all industries can leverage AI in their day to day use, there are some jobs that can really put these new technologies to use in their day-to-day environments.

According to ChatGPT itself, here are some areas where ChatGPT can be used:

Customer Service
ChatGPT can be used to build conversational AI systems that are capable of assisting customers with their inquiries, troubleshooting problems, and resolving issues. By automating the customer service process, companies can reduce the time and effort required to handle customer inquiries, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex tasks.

Content Creation
ChatGPT can be used to generate high-quality, human-like text for various content creation tasks, such as writing articles, blog posts, and product descriptions. By automating the content creation process, companies can save time and effort, and increase productivity.

Language Translation
ChatGPT can be used to translate text from one language to another, making it useful for companies that operate in multiple countries and need to communicate with customers and partners in different languages.

Healthcare
ChatGPT can be used to build conversational AI systems that assist patients with their healthcare needs. For example, patients can use a chatbot to schedule appointments, request prescription refills, or receive medical advice.

Education
ChatGPT can be used to build conversational AI systems that assist students with their studies. For example, students can use a chatbot to receive answers to their questions, receive help with their homework, or access study materials.

ChatGPT limitations

Like any technology, there are limitations as to what can be accomplished. Treat anything that ChatGPT returns with a grain of salt.

Current AI tools have been known to be incredibly persistent in their answers, even when proven wrong.

There are also multiple instances of the AI answer being technically correct, but mostly wrong. An example of this is Google’s Bard, which gave an incorrect answer during its introduction seminar that may have been technically correct if the question was asked differently.

 

We’re at an interesting point in time with AI tools. While these tools can be incredibly powerful, treat it with some healthy scepticism. From Google’s Bard giving an incorrect answer, to ChatGPT just straight up inventing fake articles to use as a source, the need for increased vigilance in what you’re reading has never been higher.

When using an AI tool, always double check and verify any information that it references when providing answers. You should also make sure to anonymize any and all data that you enter into an AI tool, to ensure that your personal information doesn’t get exposed.