The Machine Will Speak With You Now

DALL-E’s chatbot sibling is open to the public.

OpenAI, perhaps best known for its DALL-E image generator, which can produce imagery from text prompts, has opened up public access to ChatGPT — a chatbot that lets you test, explore, manipulate, harass, and generally fiddle around with the latest in “conversational” AI.

Image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney provided an early taste of what this generation of generative AI is capable of — in their case, automating a range of artistic production styles, with often competent results. ChatGPT is much less specific. It’s a general-purpose bot waiting for a question, a command, or even an observation. And it does a much better impression of a real person than anything widely available before it.

With such a wide-open prompt, figuring out what to do with can be daunting. Thankfully, new users have spent the last few days coming up with some ways to break the ice. Some have been using it as a search engine; by default, it won’t actually search the web for you, but it will attempt to answer a very wide range of both broad and highly specific questions:

It’s also apparently capable of generating passable school essays:

OpenAI is suggesting users engage with ChatGPT in a conversational way, but it’s best understood as a chat interface for a large language model that’s capable of many different sorts of tasks. You can talk with it, but you can also tell it what to do. In a pinch, for example, it’s a viable Weird Al, available for very specific parodies:

But using ChatGPT also surfaces a few critiques quite quickly. It is clearly able and will be used to automate a variety of tasks for which people are paid — jobs, in other words, or at least parts of jobs. (The chatbot interface is especially evocative of a customer service interaction, for which this sort of automation will have clear potential, at least to the people in charge.) Whether this kind of thing makes most peoples’ lives easier — or eliminates them — is the sort of unsettling question you’ll find creeping into your brain as you generate jokes for the group chat.

It’s also clearly trained on, and drawing from, a great deal of material to which it provides no clear form of credit. Additionally, users devoting time to experimenting with or breaking ChatGPT are, in effect, contributing to the effort.

by John Herrman, Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Roose, via DALL-E
[ed. I signed up. Once in awhile something comes along and changes everything, this is one of those times. See also: The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT; and, Does ChatGPT Mean Robots Are Coming For the Skilled Jobs? (NYT).]