ChatGPT may seem like the answer students, coders, and writers have been looking for, but it’s far from perfect. In fact, the generative AI can be riddled with misinformation that’s likely to get you caught. And the downsides of ChatGPT are easy to discern since you can just ask the chatbot itself.
What is ChatGPT?
Chat GPT is a chatbot built by Open AI. Just go to chat.openai.com and see for yourself. You can ask it anything.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you’ll get the right answer. Sure, it may be the answer you want to hear. It may be grammatically correct. It may even seem elegantly stated. But look a little closer, and you’ll find it’s relatively simplistic and repetitive. And it can be downright incorrect and misleading.
What are the downsides of ChatGPT?
We went right to the source to find out how the AI might come up short. According to ChatGPT itself (when asked “what is one of the major drawbacks of chatgpt?”):
“One of the major drawbacks of ChatGPT is its lack of context awareness and the possibility of generating biased or incorrect responses.
Since ChatGPT is trained on a large corpus of text data from the internet, it may sometimes generate responses that reflect the biases and inaccuracies present in that data. This can lead to the generation of incorrect information or responses that perpetuate harmful stereotypes or beliefs.
Additionally, ChatGPT operates on a token-by-token basis, meaning that it doesn’t have an overall understanding of the context of a conversation. This can lead to responses that are not fully relevant or coherent, especially when the input is complex or requires a deep understanding of a particular subject.
To mitigate these issues, it is important to carefully evaluate and curate the training data used to train language models like ChatGPT, and to use appropriate post-processing techniques to ensure the quality and accuracy of the generated responses.”
We’re impressed the AI went the extra mile and suggested some more shortcomings!
The future of ChatGPT
Yes, the chatbot is a viral sensation. And it absolutely has the ability to do some good and save some time. But it also has the ability to be used to fill the Internet (and your homework assignments) will all sorts of confident-sounding information that’s factually incorrect. And the kicker is that it may someday be trained on the same incorrect websites it helped create.
Of course, there are some pretty ominous things ChatGPT can be used for. And to be fair, Open AI has been…well, open about the downsides of ChatGPT. According to Bleeping Computer (cited below), “OpenAI has been upfront about the AI’s shortcomings including its ability to ‘produce harmful instructions or biased content and continues to fine-tune ChatGPT.” — WTF fun facts
Source: “OpenAI’s new ChatGPT bot: 10 dangerous things it’s capable of” — Bleeping Computer