Looking at the pros and cons of artificial intelligence chatbots

MADISON, S.D. (Dakota News Now) - In the world of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, a new star has emerged: ChatGPT.

Created by OpenAI, it’s making waves in the tech world for its ability to simulate human conversation with some degree of accuracy.

ChatGPT uses generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) technology, which is a type of machine learning that helps AI models interact better with humans. It also makes use of an enormous data set of human conversations to “learn” the nuances of human interactions.

The technology behind ChatGPT is impressive, to say the least. It can hold conversations, answer questions, interpret emotions and even mimic personality traits.

If you find any of this interesting, you should know that everything in this story up until this point has been written by ChatGPT.

An associate professor of computer science at Dakota State University, Austin O’Brien, has played around with ChatPGT and has implemented it into the classroom.

“I’ve told my students you can use it as a tool, but just know that you’re going to have to be able to do this on your own,” said O’Brien. “You have to be able to understand and if you don’t, you’re kind of setting yourself up for failure.”

One fear people have is that it can be used by students to cheat, but professors have found a way to prevent that issue.

“They do have a way of talking, a way of output that has been detected by other algorithms,” explained O’Brien. “There’s different ways you can do that and different websites to see if this matches something that GPT would put out there.”

There are concerns that over time, it will take away jobs.

“That whole idea is nothing necessarily new, that technology will replace certain jobs,” said O’Brien. “It’s more that we need to make sure that we can find new jobs for these people and be able to train them properly to work in new sectors.”

Despite the concerns, chatbots have shown to serve as a valuable asset.

“I’ve typed in before ‘How can I fix my water heater?’ and it’ll go in and pump out a whole bunch of information so I can actually look things up in more detail to kind of help me through that process,” said O’Brien.

It can be used as a tool to create templates for various things, such as lines of code or even a job resume.

It also serves a purpose from a fun and creative standpoint. It can help you write a hit country song or generate images.

When O’Brien asked ChatGPT to give him some dad jokes about St. Patrick’s Day, it replied:

“What do you call a fake Irish stone? A sham-rock.”

“It’s inspiration, Ideas of things that I might not have thought of myself and then I try to spin-off of that and come up with my own kind of unique take on things,” said O’Brien.

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