Beyond ChatGPT: what chatbots mean for the future

by Panzer
Whether it’s turning on its creator in “Ex Machina”...
...or looking for love in “AI” or “Her”...
Hello, I’m here
Artificial intelligence permeates Hollywood’s blockbusters
I’ll be back
But now, with the arrival of chatbots like ChatGPT...
...suddenly AI seems a lot closer to fact than fiction
This has caused more excitement in the tech world...
...than anything for several years
But it’s still hard to separate the hype...
...from the fear-mongering...
...and informed concerns
Homogenised, simple responses that are wrong
To me that leads to some form of dystopia
So what do the new AI chatbots mean for the future of the internet...
...and our relationship with machines?
What is a chatbot?
Think of it like an internet search engine, although it works differently
To the user, it’s a text box where you type questions
It’s what it does next that makes it so special
Chatbots have been around for a while
You’ve probably talked to a really rubbish one at your bank...
...or maybe your mobile operator...
...but they’ve suddenly got a lot better...
...because of a new technology called generative AI
And this technology involves basically giving lots of examples...
...of either images or text to a machine-learning system...
...and it then learns to generate its own
If you use that in a chatbot, you get a much, much cleverer chatbot
Chatbots are trained on billions of texts from the internet
This allows them to learn which words are most likely...
...to follow other words in a sentence about any given subject
These chatbots are essentially like a very sophisticated version...
...of the autocomplete on your phone or on your email
So they’re kind of constantly playing the game of what’s the next word?
It sounds very simple, but it can produce these surprisingly lifelike...
...and intelligent-sounding results
And they don’t just answer questions
Generative AI chatbots can write essays, poems or songs