You would be forgiven for thinking that ChatGPT and the hype that goes along with it appeared out of thin air a few months ago – and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
Having officially launched in November last year, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a project from San Francisco-based startup, OpenAI.
You may remember OpenAI as the same people behind viral image generator Dall•E 2.
Whilst other artificial intelligence tools have been developed before this one, they often contained enough blips to give off an uncanny valley effect, giving them away as machines. ChatGPT garnered attention for just how much its responses sound like they have come from a person – within five days of launching, more than a million people were using it.
Speaking about the tool, Elon Musk – cofounder of OpenAI before leaving the company in 2018 – called ChatGPT “scary good.”
ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.
— Mr. Tweet (@elonmusk) December 3, 2022
So what is it, and what are the implications for journalists?
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a tool that has been trained using writing that already exists on the internet, up to 2021. As a result, users can ask it questions and the tool will construct an answer that sounds authoritative and is generally accurate (the word generally being the one to pay attention to there).
The idea is that the technology will eventually be able to compete with or improve technology that we already use to search for information – tools like Google’s search engine, or digital assistants such as Siri.
The tool is currently in its research and feedback phase, which is why OpenAI has released it to be used by the public for free.
I decided to head straight to the source. After entering an email and phone number to gain access, I typed in “What is ChatGPT?”
“ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI, based on the transformer architecture. It is trained on a massive amount of text data and can generate human-like responses to various prompts in natural language.”
There’s nothing like a definition that contains more phrases you have to look up, so I tried again with “What is ChatGPT in simple terms?”
“ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model that can understand and generate text in a way that resembles human language.”
How accurate is ChatGPT?
As with all artificial intelligence, the more ChatGPT is used the smarter it will get. For now, the tool can be tripped up by unclear wording of questions, and it is limited by the fact that the information it has been programmed with only goes up to 2021 – something the tool refers to as “my knowledge cut-off.”
When I asked, “how many Australians watched the Australian Open men’s singles final in 2019?” ChatGPT replied:
“The exact number of Australians who watched the 2019 Australian Open men’s singles final is not publicly available. However, the Australian Open typically receives high television ratings in Australia and is one of the most widely watched sporting events in the country.”
Whilst it’s true that the Australian Open rates well, the number is definitely publicly available. For what it’s worth, the national peak audience on Nine was 2.603 million (Metro: 1.933 million / Regional: 670,000) and the national average audience was 2.085 million (Metro: 1.589 million / Regional: 496,000).
What does AI mean for journalists?
Will the robots storm in and take over the jobs of journalists? The short answer is no, for now.
Whilst the idea of AI taking the roles of journalists is not a new one, it’s not about to play out in the way that people fear. Platforms like Buzzfeed, CNET, and The Brag Media are already using AI to assist their sites, simply as a tool rather than as a replacement for human workers.
When Luke Girgis, CEO of The Brag Media, revealed the publication would begin experiments using artificial intelligence to write its articles, he wrote that “Just as the invention of the calculator didn’t devalue mathematicians, and Photoshop didn’t devalue the artist, AI writing won’t devalue the journalists and news writers.”
Asking a robot whether it was going to take your job seems fairly dystopian, but I gave it a crack anyway.
“No, ChatGPT is designed to assist and augment human capabilities, not replace them. Its main purpose is to generate human-like text based on a prompt, but it still requires human oversight and decision-making for most tasks.”