If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT yet, it’s about time you familiarised yourself with the artificial intelligence phenomenon taking the world by storm.
Defined as a chatbot for online customer care, “it can effectively answer questions, write articles, summarise information, and perform other tasks,” says Analytics Insight.
Tertiary institutions are already quaking at the thought of students using it to write their essays and do assignments and are already having to implement countermeasures. Using ChatGPT is easy: simply give it a few parameters (word count, topic, tone) and ask it to produce a paper. Experiments have shown that using the internet, it can produce results in seconds, which would normally take a student hours or days to reproduce.
Sure it has some drawbacks, but its application is virtually limited only by imagination.
On Insider Page 3 we see that people are using ChatGPT to suggest lines to chat up possible partners on dating apps.
So, not only will you now often see a manipulated (filtered) image of a potential date, but you may also be interacting with a bot instead of the human behind the picture.
I shudder to think of what happens when the pair eventually meet in person, and one realises that the other isn’t actually the personality they have been interacting with online.
I guess the lesson is to be mindful in the midst of the ongoing tech revolution, lest the advances it brings regresses us in our humanity.
The Independent on Saturday