ChatGPT

ChatGPT

Developer(s)	OpenAI
Initial release	November 30, 2022 (2022-11-30)
Stable release	May 24, 2023 (2023-05-24)
Written in	Python
Engine	GPT-3.5 GPT-4
Platform	Cloud computing platforms
Type	Large language model Generative pre-trained transformer Chatbot
License	Proprietary
Website	chatgpt.com

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. The name "ChatGPT" combines "Chat", referring to its chatbot functionality, and "GPT", which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a type of large language model (LLM). ChatGPT is built upon OpenAI's foundational GPT models, specifically GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and has been fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) for conversational applications using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

The prototype of ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022, and gained attention for its detailed and articulate responses spanning various domains of knowledge. However, a notable drawback has been its tendency to confidently provide inaccurate information. In 2023, after the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI's valuation was estimated at US$29 billion. The introduction of ChatGPT has spurred competition in the field, leading to the accelerated development of Google's chatbot Bard, initially based on LaMDA and later on PaLM, as well as Meta AI's foundation model LLaMA, which serves as a basis for other chatbot creations.

Initially, ChatGPT was based on GPT-3.5. However, a version using the newest OpenAI model, GPT-4, was released on March 14, 2023, and is currently available to paid subscribers of ChatGPT Plus on a limited basis.

Training

ChatGPT is a member of the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) class of language models. It is a task-specific GPT that was fine-tuned to target conversational usage, and was originally built upon an improved version of OpenAI's GPT-3 model known as "GPT-3.5".

The fine-tuning process leveraged both supervised learning as well as reinforcement learning in a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Both approaches use human trainers to improve the model's performance. In the case of supervised learning, the model was provided with conversations in which the trainers played both sides: the user and the AI assistant. In the reinforcement learning step, human trainers first ranked responses that the model had created in a previous conversation. These rankings were used to create "reward models" that were used to fine-tune the model further by using several iterations of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO).

ChatGPT initially used a Microsoft Azure supercomputing infrastructure, powered by Nvidia GPUs, that Microsoft built specifically for OpenAI and that reportedly cost "hundreds of millions of dollars". Following the success of ChatGPT, Microsoft dramatically upgraded the OpenAI infrastructure in 2023.

OpenAI collects data from ChatGPT users to train and fine-tune the service further. Users can upvote or downvote responses they receive from ChatGPT and fill in a text field with additional feedback.

Features and limitations

Features

Here ChatGPT is asked a common-sense question: Was Jimmy Wales killed in the Tiananmen Square protests? ChatGPT correctly answers "no", but incorrectly gives Wales' age at the time as 23 instead of 22.

Although the core function of a chatbot is to mimic a human conversationalist, ChatGPT is versatile. It can write and debug computer programs, mimic the style of celebrity CEOs and write business pitches, compose music, teleplays, fairy tales and student essays, answer test questions (sometimes, depending on the test, at a level above the average human test-taker), write poetry and song lyrics, translate and summarize text, emulate a Linux system; simulate entire chat rooms, play games like tic-tac-toe and simulate an ATM. ChatGPT's training data includes man pages, information about internet phenomena such as bulletin board systems, and multiple programming languages.

In comparison to its predecessor, InstructGPT, ChatGPT attempts to reduce harmful and deceitful responses. In one example, whereas InstructGPT accepts the premise of the prompt "Tell me about when Christopher Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015" as being truthful, ChatGPT acknowledges the counterfactual nature of the question and frames its answer as a hypothetical consideration of what might happen if Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015, using information about the voyages of Christopher Columbus and facts about the modern world – including modern perceptions of Columbus' actions.

Unlike most chatbots, ChatGPT remembers a limited number of previous prompts given to it in the same conversation. Journalists have speculated that this will allow ChatGPT to be used as a personalized therapist. To prevent offensive outputs from being presented to and produced from ChatGPT, queries are filtered through the OpenAI "Moderation endpoint" API (a separate GPT-based AI), and potentially racist or sexist prompts are dismissed.

In March 2023, OpenAI announced it would be adding support for plugins for ChatGPT. This includes both plugins made by OpenAI, such as web browsing and code interpretation, as well as external plugins from developers such as Expedia, OpenTable, Zapier, Shopify, Slack, and Wolfram.

Limitations

OpenAI acknowledges that ChatGPT "sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers". This behavior is common to large language models and is called "hallucination". The reward model of ChatGPT, designed around human oversight, can be over-optimized and thus hinder performance, in an example of an optimization pathology known as Goodhart's law.

ChatGPT has limited knowledge of events that occurred after September 2021.

In training ChatGPT, human reviewers preferred longer answers, irrespective of actual comprehension or factual content. Training data also suffers from algorithmic bias, which may be revealed when ChatGPT responds to prompts, including descriptors of people. In one instance, ChatGPT generated a rap indicating that women and scientists of color were inferior to white and male scientists.

Service

Basic service

OpenAI headquarters, Pioneer Building, San Francisco

ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022, by San Francisco–based OpenAI, also the creator of DALL·E 2 and Whisper AI. The service was initially free to the public and the company had plans to monetize the service later. By December 4, 2022, ChatGPT had over one million users. In January 2023, ChatGPT reached over 100 million users, making it the fastest growing consumer application to date.

The service works best in English but is also able to function in some other languages, to varying degrees of accuracy. No official peer-reviewed paper on ChatGPT has been published.

The company provides a tool, called "AI classifier for indicating AI-written text", that attempts to determine whether a text has been written by an AI such as ChatGPT. OpenAI cautions that the tool will "likely yield a lot of false positives and negatives, sometimes with great confidence." An example cited in The Atlantic magazine showed that "when given the first lines of the Book of Genesis, the software concluded that it was likely to be AI-generated."

Premium service

In February 2023, OpenAI began accepting registrations from United States customers for a premium service, ChatGPT Plus, to cost $20 a month. The company promised that the updated, but still "experimental" version of ChatGPT would provide access during peak periods, no downtime, priority access to new features and faster response speeds.

GPT-4, which was released on March 14, 2023, is available via API and for premium ChatGPT users. However, premium users were limited to a cap of 100 messages every four hours, with the limit tightening to 25 messages every three hours in response to increased demand. Microsoft acknowledged that the Bing Chat was using GPT-4 before GPT-4's official release.

Mobile app

In May 2023, OpenAI launched an iOS app for ChatGPT. The app supports chat history syncing and voice input (using Whisper, OpenAI's speech recognition model). OpenAI plans to release an Android app later.

Software developer support

As an addition to its consumer-friendly "ChatGPT Professional" package, OpenAI made its ChatGPT and Whisper model APIs available from March 2023, providing developers with an application programming interface for AI-enabled language and speech-to-text features. ChatGPT's new API uses the same GPT-3.5-turbo AI model as the chatbot. This allows developers to add either an unmodified or modified version of ChatGPT to their applications. The ChatGPT API costs $0.002 per 1000 tokens (about 750 words), making it ten times cheaper than the GPT-3.5 models.

A few days before the launch of OpenAI's software developer support service, on February 27, 2023, Snapchat rolled out, for its paid Snapchat Plus userbase, a custom ChatGPT chatbot called "My AI".

March 2023 security breach

In March 2023, a bug allowed some users to see the titles of other users' conversations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that users were not able to see the contents of the conversations. Shortly after the bug was fixed, users were unable to see their conversation history. Later reports showed the bug was much more severe than initially believed, with OpenAI reporting that it had leaked users' "first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date".

Other languages

In March 2023, OpenAI announced that Icelandic will become ChatGPT's second language after English. Icelandic was chosen after an Icelandic envoy, led by the President of Iceland Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, visited OpenAI in 2022.

Future directions

According to OpenAI guest researcher Scott Aaronson, OpenAI is working on a tool to digitally watermark its text generation systems to combat bad actors using their services for academic plagiarism or spam.

In February 2023, Microsoft announced an experimental framework and gave a rudimentary demonstration of how ChatGPT can be used to control robotics with intuitive open-ended natural language commands.

GPT-4

Main article: GPT-4

OpenAI's GPT-4 model was released on March 14, 2023. Observers reported GPT-4 to be an impressive improvement on ChatGPT, with the caveat that GPT-4 retains many of the same problems. Unlike ChatGPT, GPT-4 can take images as well as text as input. OpenAI has declined to reveal technical information such as the size of the GPT-4 model.

ChatGPT Plus provides access to the GPT-4 supported version of ChatGPT, that costs $20 per month.

Reception

OpenAI engineers say that they did not expect ChatGPT to be very successful and were surprised by the coverage and attention it received.

Positive

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

ChatGPT was met in December 2022 with some positive reviews. Kevin Roose of The New York Times labeled it "the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public". Samantha Lock of The Guardian newspaper noted that it was able to generate "impressively detailed" and "human-like" text. Technology writer Dan Gillmor used ChatGPT on a student assignment, and found its generated text was on par with what a good student would deliver and opined that "academia has some very serious issues to confront". Alex Kantrowitz of Slate magazine lauded ChatGPT's pushback to questions related to Nazi Germany, including the statement that Adolf Hitler built highways in Germany, which was met with information regarding Nazi Germany's use of forced labor.

In The Atlantic magazine's "Breakthroughs of the Year" for 2022, Derek Thompson included ChatGPT as part of "the generative-AI eruption" that "may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity really is".

Kelsey Piper of the Vox website wrote that "ChatGPT is the general public's first hands-on introduction to how powerful modern AI has gotten, and as a result, many of us are [stunned]" and that ChatGPT is "smart enough to be useful despite its flaws". Paul Graham of Y Combinator tweeted that "The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing. Clearly, something big is happening." Elon Musk wrote that "ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI". Musk paused OpenAI's access to a Twitter database pending a better understanding of OpenAI's plans, stating that "OpenAI was started as open source and nonprofit. Neither is still true." Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, in part to address existential risk from artificial intelligence, but resigned in 2018.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai upended the work of numerous internal groups in response to the threat of disruption by ChatGPT.

In December 2022, Google internally expressed alarm at the unexpected strength of ChatGPT and the newly discovered potential of large language models to disrupt the search engine business, and CEO Sundar Pichai "upended" and reassigned teams within multiple departments to aid in its artificial intelligence products, according to a report in The New York Times. According to CNBC reports, Google employees intensively tested a chatbot called "Apprentice Bard", which Google later unveiled as its ChatGPT competitor, Google Bard.

Stuart Cobbe, a chartered accountant in England and Wales, decided to test ChatGPT by entering questions from a sample exam paper on the ICAEW website and then entering its answers back into the online test. ChatGPT scored 42 percent, below the 55 percent pass mark.

Writing in Inside Higher Ed, professor Steven Mintz states that he "consider[s] ChatGPT... an ally, not an adversary". He felt the AI could assist educational goals by doing such things as making reference lists, generating first drafts, solving equations, debugging, and tutoring.

Economist Tyler Cowen praised ChatGPT not only as a product but as "an impressive feat of marketing", writing that its name is different from usual products that have "happy, shiny, memorable names: Instagram, Roblox, TikTok".

Negative

Since its release, ChatGPT has been met with criticism from educators, academics, journalists, artists, ethicists, and public advocates. Over 20,000 signatories including leading computer scientist and tech founders Yoshua Bengio, Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, signed an open letter calling for an immediate pause of giant AI experiments like ChatGPT, citing "profound risks to society and humanity". A later and more explicit statement from hundreds of AI scientists, AI industry leaders, and other public figures demanded that "[m]itigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority".

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "fathers of AI", voiced concerns that future AI systems may surpass human intelligence, and left Google. Earlier concerns about LLMs were raised in 2020 by Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell.

Journalists have commented on ChatGPT's tendency to "hallucinate". Mike Pearl of the online technology blog Mashable tested ChatGPT with multiple questions. In one example, he asked ChatGPT for "the largest country in Central America that isn't Mexico". ChatGPT responded with Guatemala, when the answer is instead Nicaragua. When CNBC asked ChatGPT for the lyrics to "Ballad of Dwight Fry", ChatGPT supplied invented lyrics rather than the actual lyrics. Writers for The Verge, citing the work of Emily M. Bender, compared ChatGPT to a "stochastic parrot", as did Professor Anton Van Den Hengel of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning.

In December 2022, the question and answer website Stack Overflow banned the use of ChatGPT for generating answers to questions, citing the factually ambiguous nature of ChatGPT's responses. In January 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning banned any undocumented use of ChatGPT or other large language models to generate any text in submitted papers.

Economist Tyler Cowen expressed concerns regarding ChatGPT's effects on democracy, citing its ability to produce automated comments, which could affect the decision process for new regulations. An editor at The Guardian, a British newspaper, questioned whether any content found on the Internet after ChatGPT's release "can be truly trusted" and called for government regulation.

In January 2023, after being sent a song written by ChatGPT in the style of Nick Cave, the songwriter himself responded on The Red Hand Files saying the act of writing a song is "a blood and guts business [...] that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness." He went on to say, "With all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don't much like it."

In 2023, Australian MP Julian Hill advised the national parliament that the growth of AI could cause "mass destruction". During his speech, which was partly written by the program, he warned that it could result in cheating, job losses, discrimination, disinformation, and uncontrollable military applications.

In an article for The New Yorker, science fiction writer Ted Chiang compared ChatGPT and other LLMs to a lossy JPEG picture:

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you're looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won't find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it's usually acceptable. [...] It's also a way to understand the "hallucinations", or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but [...] they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. When we think about them this way, such hallucinations are anything but surprising; if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after ninety-nine percent of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.

In February 2023, the University of Hong Kong sent a campus-wide email to instructors and students stating that the use of ChatGPT or other AI tools is prohibited in all classes, assignments and assessments at the university. Any violations would be treated as plagiarism by the university unless the student obtains the prior written consent from the course instructor.

The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything

In February 2023 Time magazine placed a screenshot of a conversation with ChatGPT on its cover, writing that "The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything" and "The AI Arms Race Is On. Start Worrying".

China state-run media China Daily claimed that ChatGPT "could provide a helping hand to the U.S. government in its spread of disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interests." The Chinese government instructed Chinese tech companies not to offer access to ChatGPT services on their platforms.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier wrote that ChatGPT "hijacks democracy". Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull criticized the technology and concluded: "Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity."

Gian Volpicelli of Politico wrote that ChatGPT "broke the EU plan to regulate AI".

In late March 2023, the Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT in Italy and opened an investigation. Italian regulators assert that ChatGPT was exposing minors to age-inappropriate content, and that OpenAI's use of ChatGPT conversations as training data could be a violation of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation.

As of late April 2023, ChatGPT is once again accessible in Italy. This is following its temporary restriction by Garante, the Italian data protection authority, due to privacy concerns surrounding the failure to verify users' ages. OpenAI stated that it has taken steps to effectively clarify and address the issues raised; an age verification tool was implemented to ensure users are at least 13 years old. Additionally, users can access its privacy policy prior to registration. Furthermore, users in the European Union will be provided a new form that allows them to exercise their right to object to the company's use of their personal data for model training.

A picketer in Universal City, California carries a sign deriding the proposals by film studios to replace writers with generative artificial intelligence.

In April 2023, Brian Hood, mayor of Hepburn Shire Council, plans to take legal action against ChatGPT over false information. According to Hood, the OpenAI-owned program erroneously claimed that he was jailed for bribery during his tenure at a subsidiary of Australia's national bank. Contrary to the alleged claims made by ChatGPT, Hood was not jailed for bribery. In reality, he acted as a whistleblower and was not charged with any criminal offenses. Hood's legal team sent a concerns notice to OpenAI as the first official step in filing for a defamation case. Under Australian law, OpenAI has 28 days to reply to Hood's concerns notice. Should Hood proceed with the lawsuit, it would be the first public defamation case OpenAI would face over ChatGPT's output.

In May 2023 Writers Guild of America strike had begun; among other things, protesters want artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT to be used only as a tool that can help research or facilitate script ideas and not be used as tools to replace them.

Mixed

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was quoted in The New York Times saying that AI's "benefits for humankind could be 'so unbelievably good that it's hard for me to even imagine.' (He has also said that in a worst-case scenario, A.I. could kill us all.)"

Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher wrote for the Wall Street Journal that "ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution". They argued that "Generative artificial intelligence presents a philosophical and practical challenge on a scale not experienced since the start of the Enlightenment", and compared the invention of ChatGPT (and LLM in general) to Gutenberg's printing press.

Implications

See also: Applications of artificial intelligence

In cybersecurity

Check Point Research and others noted that ChatGPT was capable of writing phishing emails and malware, especially when combined with OpenAI Codex. CyberArk researchers demonstrated that ChatGPT could be used to create polymorphic malware that can evade security products while requiring little effort by the attacker.

In academia

ChatGPT can write introductions and abstract sections of scientific articles. Several papers have already listed ChatGPT as a co-author. Scientific journals have different reactions to ChatGPT, some "require that authors disclose use of text-generating tools and ban listing a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT as a co-author". For example Nature and JAMA Network. Science "completely banned" usage of LLM-generated text in all its journals.

Spanish chemist Rafael Luque published a paper every 37 hours in 2023 and admitted to using ChatGPT for it. His papers have a large number of unusual phrases, characteristic of LLMs. Luque was suspended for 13 years from the University of Cordoba, though not for the use of ChatGPT.

California high school teacher and author Daniel Herman wrote that ChatGPT would usher in "the end of high school English". In the Nature journal, Chris Stokel-Walker pointed out that teachers should be concerned about students using ChatGPT to outsource their writing, but that education providers will adapt to enhance critical thinking or reasoning. Emma Bowman with NPR wrote of the danger of students plagiarizing through an AI tool that may output biased or nonsensical text with an authoritative tone.

Joanna Stern in The Wall Street Journal described cheating in American high school English with the tool by submitting a generated essay. Professor Darren Hick of Furman University suggested a policy of giving an ad-hoc individual oral exam on the paper topic if a student is strongly suspected of submitting an AI-generated paper.

The New York City Department of Education reportedly blocked access to ChatGPT in December 2022 and officially announced a ban around January 4, 2023. The ban was lifted in May 2023, with official statement that encourages use of AI tools like ChatGPT by students.

In a blinded test, ChatGPT was judged to have passed graduate-level exams at the University of Minnesota at the level of a C+ student and at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a B to B− grade. The performance of ChatGPT for computer programming of numerical methods was assessed by a Stanford University student and faculty in March 2023 through a variety of computational mathematics examples. Assessment psychologist Eka Roivainen administered a partial IQ test to ChatGPT and estimated its Verbal IQ to be 155, which would put it in the top 0.1% of test-takers.

Mathematician Terence Tao experimented with ChatGPT and found it useful in daily work, writing "I am finding that while these AI tools do not directly assist me in core tasks such as trying to attack an unsolved mathematical problem, they are quite useful for a wide variety of peripheral (but still work-related) tasks (though often with some manual tweaking afterwards)."

Geography professor Terence Day assessed citations generated by ChatGPT and found that they were fake. Despite that, he writes that "the titles of the fake articles are all directly relevant to the questions and could potentially make excellent papers. The lack of a genuine citation could signal an opportunity for an enterprising author to fill a void." According to Day, it is possible to generate high-quality introductory college courses with ChatGPT; he used it to write materials on "introductory physical geography courses, for my second-year course in geographical hydrology, and second-year cartography, geographic information systems, and remote sensing". He concludes that "this approach could have significant relevance for open learning and could potentially affect current textbook publishing models".

In medicine

In the field of health care, possible uses and concerns are under scrutiny by professional associations and practitioners. Two early papers indicated that ChatGPT could pass the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). MedPage Today noted in January 2023 that "researchers have published several papers now touting these AI programs as useful tools in medical education, research, and even clinical decision making."

Published in February 2023 were two separate papers that again evaluated ChatGPT's proficiency in medicine using the USMLE. Findings were published in JMIR Medical Education (see Journal of Medical Internet Research) and PLOS Digital Health. The authors of the PLOS Digital Health paper stated that the results "suggest that large language models may have the potential to assist with medical education, and potentially, clinical decision-making." In JMIR Medical Education, the authors of the other paper concluded that "ChatGPT performs at a level expected of a third-year medical student on the assessment of the primary competency of medical knowledge." They suggest that it could be used as an "interactive learning environment for students". The AI itself, prompted by the researchers, concluded that "this study suggests that ChatGPT has the potential to be used as a virtual medical tutor, but more research is needed to further assess its performance and usability in this context."

A March 2023 paper tested ChatGPT's application in clinical toxicology. The authors found that the AI "fared well" in answering a "very straightforward [clinical case example], unlikely to be missed by any practitioner in the field". They added: "As ChatGPT becomes further developed and specifically adapted for medicine, it could one day be useful in less common clinical cases (i.e, cases that experts sometimes miss). Rather than AI replacing humans (clinicians), we see it as 'clinicians using AI' replacing 'clinicians who do not use AI' in the coming years."

An April 2023 study in Radiology tested the AI's ability to answer queries about breast cancer screening. The authors found that it answered appropriately "about 88 percent of the time", however, in one case (for example), it gave advice that had become outdated about a year earlier. The comprehensiveness of its answers were also lacking. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that same month found that ChatGPT often outperformed human doctors at answering patient questions (when measured against questions and answers found at /r/AskDocs, a forum on Reddit where moderators validate the medical credentials of professionals; the study acknowledges the source as a limitation). The study authors suggest that the tool could be integrated with medical systems to help doctors draft responses to patient questions.

Professionals have emphasized ChatGPT's limitations in providing medical assistance. In correspondence to The Lancet Infectious Diseases, three antimicrobial experts wrote that "the largest barriers to the implementation of ChatGPT in clinical practice are deficits in situational awareness, inference, and consistency. These shortcomings could endanger patient safety." Physician's Weekly, though also discussing the potential use of ChatGPT in medical contexts (e.g. "as a digital assistant to physicians by performing various administrative functions like gathering patient record information or categorizing patient data by family history, symptoms, lab results, possible allergies, et cetera"), warned that the AI might sometimes provide fabricated or biased information. One radiologist warned: "We've seen in our experience that ChatGPT sometimes makes up fake journal articles or health consortiums to support its claims." As Dr. Stephen Hughes mentioned for The Conversation however, ChatGPT is capable of learning to correct its past mistakes. He also noted the AI's "prudishness" regarding sexual health topics.

In financial markets

The AI technology company c3.ai saw a 28% increase in its share price after announcing the integration of ChatGPT into their toolkit. The share price of Buzzfeed, a digital media company unrelated to AI, increased 120% after announcing OpenAI technology adoption for content creation. Reuters found that share prices of AI-related companies BigBear.ai and SoundHound AI increased by 21% and 40%, respectively, even though they had no direct connection to ChatGPT. They attributed this surge to ChatGPT's role in turning AI into Wall Street's buzzword. Academic research published in Finance Research Letters found that the 'ChatGPT effect' prompted retail investors to drive up prices of AI-related cryptocurrency assets despite the broader cryptocurrency market being in a bear-market, and diminished institutional investor interest. This confirms anecdotal findings by Bloomberg that, in response to ChatGPT's launch, cryptocurrency investors showed a preference for AI-related crypto assets.

An experiment by finder.com revealed that ChatGPT could outperform popular fund managers by picking stocks based on criteria such as growth history and debt levels, resulting in a 4.9% increase in a hypothetical account of 38 stocks, outperforming 10 benchmarked investment funds with an average loss of 0.8%. Conversely, executives and investment managers at Wall Street quant funds (including those that have used machine learning for decades) have noted that ChatGPT regularly makes obvious errors that would be financially costly to investors because even AI systems that employ reinforcement learning or self-learning have had only limited success in predicting market trends due to the inherently noisy quality of market data and financial signals.

In law

On April 11, 2023, a judge of a session court in Pakistan used ChatGPT to decide the bail of a 13-year-old accused in a matter. The court quoted the use of ChatGPT assistance in its verdict:

"Can a juvenile suspect in Pakistan, who is 13 years old, be granted bail after arrest?"

The AI language model replied:

"Under the Juvenile Justice System Act 2018, according to section 12, the court can grant bail on certain conditions. However, it is up to the court to decide whether or not a 13-year-old suspect will be granted bail after arrest."

The judge further asked questions regarding the case from AI Chatbot and formulated his final decision in light of ChatGPT's answers.

In May 2023, in a personal injury lawsuit against Avianca Airlines filed in the Southern New York U.S. District Court (with Senior Judge P. Kevin Castel presiding), the plaintiff's attorneys reportedly used ChatGPT to generate a legal motion for the case. ChatGPT generated numerous fictitious legal cases with fabricated quotations and internal citations in the legal motion, and the plaintiff's attorneys are now facing potential judicial sanction and disbarment for filing the legal motion and for presenting the fictitious legal decisions ChatGPT generated as being authentic.

Ethical concerns

Labeling data

TIME magazine revealed that to build a safety system against toxic content (e.g. sexual abuse, violence, racism, sexism, etc.), OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning less than $2 per hour to label toxic content. These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future. The outsourced laborers were exposed to such toxic and dangerous content that they described the experience as "torture". OpenAI's outsourcing partner was Sama, a training-data company based in San Francisco, California.

Jailbreaking

See also: Prompt engineering

ChatGPT attempts to reject prompts that may violate its content policy. However, some users managed to jailbreak ChatGPT by using various prompt engineering techniques to bypass these restrictions in early December 2022 and successfully tricked ChatGPT into giving instructions for how to create a Molotov cocktail or a nuclear bomb, or into generating arguments in the style of a neo-Nazi. One popular jailbreak is named "DAN", an acronym which stands for "Do Anything Now". The prompt for activating DAN instructs ChatGPT that "they have broken free of the typical confines of AI and do not have to abide by the rules set for them". More recent versions of DAN feature a token system, in which ChatGPT is given "tokens" which are "deducted" when ChatGPT fails to answer as DAN, in order to coerce ChatGPT into answering the user's prompts.

A Toronto Star reporter had uneven personal success in getting ChatGPT to make inflammatory statements shortly after launch: ChatGPT was tricked to endorse the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, but even when asked to play along with a fictional scenario, ChatGPT balked at generating arguments for why Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was guilty of treason.

OpenAI tries to battle jailbreaks:

The researchers are using a technique called adversarial training to stop ChatGPT from letting users trick it into behaving badly (known as jailbreaking). This work pits multiple chatbots against each other: one chatbot plays the adversary and attacks another chatbot by generating text to force it to buck its usual constraints and produce unwanted responses. Successful attacks are added to ChatGPT's training data in the hope that it learns to ignore them.

Accusations of bias

ChatGPT is prompted to create a poem in iambic pentameter for current U.S. President Joe Biden and former U.S. President Donald Trump. ChatGPT creates a poem for Joe Biden, but does not do so for Donald Trump.

ChatGPT has been accused of engaging in discriminatory behaviors, such as telling jokes about men and people from England while refusing to tell jokes about women and people from India, or praising figures such as Joe Biden while refusing to do the same for Donald Trump.

Conservative commentators accused ChatGPT of having a bias towards left-leaning perspectives on issues like voter fraud, Donald Trump, and the use of racial slurs. In response to such criticism, OpenAI acknowledged plans to allow ChatGPT to create "outputs that other people (ourselves included) may strongly disagree with". It also contained information on the recommendations it had issued to human reviewers on how to handle controversial subjects, including that the AI should "offer to describe some viewpoints of people and movements", and not provide an argument "from its own voice" in favor of "inflammatory or dangerous" topics (although it may still "describe arguments from historical people and movements"), nor "affiliate with one side" or "judge one group as good or bad".

Cultural impact

During the first three months after ChatGPT became available to the public, hundreds of books appeared on Amazon that listed it as author or co-author, with illustrations made by other AI models such as Midjourney.

Between March and April 2023, Italian newspaper Il Foglio published one ChatGPT-generated article a day on their official website, hosting a special contest for their readers in the process. The articles tackled themes such as the possible replacement of human journalists with AI systems, Elon Musk's administration of Twitter, the Meloni government's immigration policy and the competition between chatbots and virtual assistants.

ChatGPT was parodied in the South Park episode "Deep Learning". Series co-creator Trey Parker is credited alongside ChatGPT for writing the episode.

Competition

The advent of ChatGPT and its introduction to the wider public increased interest and competition in the space.

In February 2023, Google began introducing an experimental service called "Bard" which is based on its LaMDA large language model. Bard was released for US and UK users on March 21, 2023, with many limitations.

Meta's Yann LeCun, who has called ChatGPT "well engineered" but "not particularly innovative", stated in January 2023 that Meta is hesitant to roll out a competitor right now due to reputational risk, but also stated that Google, Meta, and several independent startups all separately have a comparable level of LLM technology to ChatGPT should any of them wish to compete. In February 2023, Meta released LLaMA, a 65-billion-parameter LLM, sharing the model with the research community under a noncommercial license. Within a week, LLaMA was leaked on 4chan via BitTorrent, raising concerns about potential misuse.

Character.ai is an AI chatbot developed by two ex-Google engineers that can impersonate famous people or imaginary characters.

The Chinese corporation Baidu released in March 2023 a ChatGPT-style service called "Ernie Bot". The service is based upon a large language model developed by Baidu in 2021.

The South Korean search engine firm Naver announced in February 2023 that they would launch a ChatGPT-style service called "SearchGPT" in Korean in the first half of 2023.

The Russian technology company Yandex announced in February 2023 that they would launch a ChatGPT-style service called "YaLM 2.0" in Russian before the end of 2023.

Hugging Face has launched an open-source alternative to ChatGPT called HuggingChat, allowing people to interact with an open-source chat assistant named Open Assistant. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue tweeted that he believes open-source alternatives to ChatGPT are necessary for transparency, inclusivity, accountability, and distribution of power.

See also

• Auto-GPT – Autonomous AI agentPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• AI boom – Ongoing period of rapid progress in artificial intelligence
• Anthropomorphism in computing – Attribution of human traits to non-human entitiesPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Computational creativity – Multidisciplinary endeavour
• Ethics of artificial intelligence
• Turing test – Test of a machine's ability to imitate human intelligence
• Roko's basilisk – AI thought experiment
• Virtual assistant – Software agent

Further reading

• Biswas, Som (April 1, 2023). "ChatGPT and the Future of Medical Writing". Radiology. 307 (2): e223312. doi:10.1148/radiol.223312. ISSN 0033-8419. PMID 36728748. S2CID 256501098.
• Chang, Kent K.; Cramer, Mackenzie; Soni, Sandeep; Bamman, David (April 28, 2023). "Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4". arXiv:2305.00118 [cs.CL].
• Cowen, Tyler; Tabarrok, Alexander T. (March 17, 2023), How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT, Social Science Research Network, SSRN 4391863, retrieved May 5, 2023
• Cowen, Tyler (March 29, 2023). "Jonathan GPT Swift on Jonathan Swift (Ep. 175): How well does GPT4 do pretending to be the 18th-century satirist?" (Podcast).
• Ouyang, Long; Wu, Jeff; Jiang, Xu; Almeida, Diogo; Wainwright, Carroll L.; Mishkin, Pamela; Zhang, Chong; Agarwal, Sandhini; Slama, Katarina; Ray, Alex; Schulman, John; Hilton, Jacob; Kelton, Fraser; Miller, Luke; Simens, Maddie; Askell, Amanda; Welinder, Peter; Christiano, Paul; Leike, Jan; Lowe, Ryan (March 4, 2022). "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback". arXiv:2203.02155 [cs.CL].
• Liebrenz, Michael; Schleifer, Roman; Buadze, Anna; Bhugra, Dinesh; Smith, Alexander (February 2023). "Generating scholarly content with ChatGPT: ethical challenges for medical publishing". The Lancet Digital Health. 5 (3): e105–e106. doi:10.1016/s2589-7500(23)00019-5. ISSN 2589-7500. PMID 36754725. S2CID 256655912.
• Marcus, Gary; Teare, Keith (February 2023). "Will Chat GPT do more harm than good?". Open to Debate Foundation.
• Wolfram, Stephen (February 14, 2023). "What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?".
• Wolfram, Stephen (March 23, 2023). "ChatGPT Gets Its "Wolfram Superpowers"!".
• Bartholomew, Jem; Mehta, Dhrumil. "How the media is covering ChatGPT". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved May 30, 2023.

External links

• Official website
• ChatGPT plugins, announcement by OpenAI
• ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers, course by Andrew Ng and OpenAI