WANT to write a song, a sonnet or a sparkling job application?
The latest tech milestone promises to create any piece of writing in the style you desire — after a few prompts — and it is all done by computer software.
ChatGPT, Elon Musk’s latest project, uses artificial intelligence, or AI — the ability of machines to “think” for themselves.
And the website, rolled out by tech company OpenAI, has been an instant hit.
Some users have asked the service to write CVs and job applications, chat to their Tinder matches or create a nursery rhyme in the style of Donald Trump.
But when we invited the software to try to match the wit and skill of The Sun’s best headline wizards and rewrite some of the classics, it fell a mile short. On these pages we compare eight great Sun front pages with alternative headlines written by the app.
The program is driven by something called a large language model, a learning algorithm that can recognise, summarise, predict and create text or other content based on knowledge gained from huge amounts of data.
Five days after it launched in November last year, one million people had signed up for it — a feat that took Netflix three years. Now, with more than 100million of us logging into ChatGPT by the end of last month, it has introduced waiting lists for new users.
Unsurprisingly, the bot has been a big hit with students, who have been using it to crank out essays that look convincingly genuine — so much so that ChatGPT has had to develop a tool for teachers to scan their classes’ work for AI trickery.
But users are discovering the program can be used for more than just plagiarism and forgery, such as putting together recipes or writing code for websites.
Most read in Tech
Sensitive data
Even so, its success is variable, particularly with basic maths — developers had to rejig the bot after users convinced it that 2+2=5.
Despite such setbacks, the advance of “thinking” machines continues.
News website BuzzFeed announced last month it plans to use AI to create quizzes, while tech website CNET has published AI-generated articles — after they were checked by human editors.
But there’s a dark side to the tech. Even OpenAI owner Musk admitted last year: “We need to be extremely careful with AI since it is potentially more destructive than nukes.”
Scammers have used the bot to create fake, but convincingly realistic, “girls” to trick online daters into handing over cash.
Israeli tech security firm Check Point warned that cyber criminals could use the bot to create software which lets them lock a target’s computers and hold them to ransom or even steal sensitive data.
And the sudden rise of AI has led to fears that robots could replace human jobs, with cashiers, drivers, translators and customer service agents named as professions most likely to be taken over by AI.
According to Forbes magazine, automation has already replaced 1.7million human jobs in the past 23 years.
The promise of more efficient cheaper labour has seen big tech firms Google, Microsoft and Amazon investing heavily in the relatively new development.
Think-tank Riot Research believes AI may be the next big stock-market bubble, akin to the early-2000s dot-com boom.
Meanwhile ChatGPT’s rival tech projects have not quite matched its success. Google’s new AI conversation bot, Bard, wiped £82billion from the company’s market value this month after giving the wrong answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.
Investors were not impressed by the error and Google shares plunged eight per cent.
So can ChatGPT truly match human talent? Here’s everything you need to know.
The write stuff – or a grotesque mockery
IN case you’re still not sure exactly what ChatGPT is, we asked the software to explain just bot it’s all about . . .
WHAT is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a conversational AI language model developed by OpenAI. It can generate human-like responses to natural language questions and prompts.
WHO invented ChatGPT and when?
OpenAI, a research organisation founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman, invented ChatGPT. The first version was released in 2019.
HOW does ChatGPT work?
It is based on a deep-learning technique called Transformer, a type of neural network architecture that is particularly well suited for processing sequences of data, such as text.
HOW can people use ChatGPT?
People can use ChatGPT for various tasks such as question-answering, text completion, conversational AI, language translation, text summarisation, text generation such as stories, poems or jokes, or sentiment analysis, to analyse the sentiment of a given text and determine if it is positive, negative, or neutral.
DO you talk like a human?
I do not have my own thoughts, emotions or consciousness. The text I generate is designed to sound like it was written by a human, but I am not capable of thinking or communicating like a human.
ARE you going to take over the world?
I do not have my own goals, desires or motivations. I was created to serve as a tool for people to use for various tasks, such as answering questions and generating text. I do not have the ability to act on my own or take over the world.
It is important for AI systems like me to be developed and used responsibly to benefit humanity and not cause harm.
NICK Cave called you “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”. What is your response?
I don’t have emotions or personal opinions, but I understand why some might view AI in that way.
However, I was created to assist and augment human communication and knowledge, and I strive to do so to the best of my abilities.
DO you read The Sun newspaper?
No, I am an AI language model and do not have the ability to read or consume any type of media.
Could it bag a date for Nate?
ONLINE daters have been seeking ChatGPT’s help.
One, Nate, asked it: “A girl I matched with on Hinge has quality time listed as her love language. Write me a first message to send her.”
It suggested: “Hey there! I see we both value quality time. Want to make some quality time for each other?”
A Canadian academic asked it to write a “soulful” poem about winter.
It wrote: “Winter’s chill, a crispness in the air, the trees stand bare, stripped of their leaves.
“The sky is grey, a blanket overhead, but there is a stillness, a sense of peace instead.”
