By this point, most people have probably heard of ChatGPT in one way or another, but most people have either no idea or only a vague idea of what it is. In this article, I’m going to explain what ChatGPT is, but not only that. I also want to take a different approach: I’m not going to just share the capabilities, but also the moral side of it. Should we use ChatGPT, how is it going to change society, etc.? Without further ado, let’s get into this!
ChatGPT is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbot developed by Open AI. While GPT-3 itself has been around for a while now, it hasn’t been in chat form. With ChatGPT, you can chat with the chatbot as if it were a human. ChatGPT can write essays, do research, answer questions, give advice, tell stories, write articles, and so much more! You can even ask it to explain things to a specific age group or write a paper like a person from a specific grade or with a certain way of speaking (like a pirate). During my testing with ChatGPT, I asked it to write a plot line for a book, tell me who different people are, and write a sample ‘about page’ for a newsletter such as mine. It is truly spectacular what ChatGPT can do. You can literally ask it almost anything, and it will give you a pretty accurate response!
Now, to the moral side of things because this is where it gets “fun.” A question arises as AI gets developed. Hasn't anybody seen Age of Ultron, The Matrix, or Terminator? Seriously, though, these movies all talked about robots/AI taking over the world and usually ended up in controlling or killing humans. While this may not happen (yet), there are still some moral ideas to be considered. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.A few weeks ago, one of my teachers stated that he used it to write an essay using a prompt he had given to one of his students. He said that he would have given an A to the essay that Chat GPT gave him! Another one of my teachers started off class by talking to us about ChatGPT and how powerful it is and why we shouldn’t use it. She forbid us from using it in her class, which I agree is completely fair, as it could totally be used to write essays or do research. This chatbot is changing the workplace, schools, and people’s lives in a whole new way! In my mind, ChatGPT is a tool like the calculator, for example. Kids have to learn addition, multiplication, fractions, etc. before using a calculator because those are things that you need to know in life. When you get to middle school and high school math, though, you get to use a calculator. This is how I view ChatGPT. We have to learn how to write because that is important. Once we get to a higher point in writing, though, and can write and communicate ideas clearly and comprehensibly (maybe after graduating college), AI can be used since it can speed up work. Disclaimer: Just to be clear, I do not think students should use ChatGPT to write their papers, whether your teacher is aware that it exists or not.
Another thing to consider is how this will change the workplace. This bot could take jobs normally done by humans like writing reports, doing research, or even designing websites! Finally, something I’ve been thinking about is how does this affect writing? As a writer myself, I have been wondering what this does to the value of writing. If ChatGPT can write so clearly, what does that mean for human writing? Does the value decrease because there could be so much writing out there, even if it is written by ChatGPT? Or does the value increase because human writing becomes more valuable? Another question: can we even tell the difference? OpenAI actually designed a program to detect if something is written by ChatGPT or by a human. This doesn’t always work though, and you can actually tell ChatGPT to write it so it won’t be detected, meaning the detector is rendered almost useless. Remember, my teacher would have given that paper that he wrote using ChatGPT an A! I could have even written most of this post in ChatGPT, and you probably wouldn’t have known (I didn’t do that). These are all important questions to ask as we enter this new era of technology in our society. We have to be careful about how we think about and use ChatGPT. In summary, I believe that ChatGPT is a tool that should be used carefully that could benefit society by helping people in their daily lives! Try it out here.
Thank you for joining me on this journey as we explored ChatGPT and the moral standpoint of it! If you agree or disagree with my analysis or have anything to add, please let me know in the comments!