Have you ever wondered what the future may look like? ChatGPT might be a small peak at what’s to come for new technological advancements. On November 30th, 2022, Artificial Intelligence (AI) company OpenAI created this new state-of-the-art AI chatbot that has the ability to generate human-like responses in real time. In less than a week, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the service, intrigued to see the true power of the website. By December 5th, the service reached 1 million users. For comparison: it took Instagram two months and Spotify five months to reach 1 million users.
OpenAI are the geniuses behind this new phenomenon. In 2015, a group of entrepreneurs and researchers, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman, founded this organization in hopes of “advancing and promoting the responsible development of AI.” This is not the first time OpenAI has made significant advances in AI. Back in 2021, they released a service called DALL-E, which uses AI to generate high-quality images based on a given prompt. These images were so realistic that it makes it difficult to distinguish between man-made or AI-made. ChatGPT is different, and can change the way we do certain things in the future.
So, what can it do? ChatGPT has the ability to perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP), ranging from writing a detailed summary on any topic of your choice to creating a specific meal plan, all in a matter of seconds. It can even detect any racist, sexist, or illegal questions that you try to ask, preventing you from getting a response on something inappropriate. All you have to do is type in your prompt, and the chatbot will spew out all the information you were asking for faster than the wink of an eye. For example, I told the chatbot “explain why we can’t print more money as if you were speaking to a child.” In a matter of seconds, I was greeted with this response:

Imagine you are playing a game where you have a certain number of coins that you can use to buy things. If you want to buy something that costs more coins than you have, you can’t just magically produce more coins out of thin air. You would have to save up your coins or trade them for something else of value in order to get more coins. In the same way, a country’s government can’t just produce more money out of thin air whenever it wants to. If a government were to simply print more money, it would cause the value of the money to go down, because there would be more of it in circulation. This is called inflation. For example, imagine if the government decided to print an extra $100 for every person in the country. At first, it might seem like everyone has more money to spend, but soon prices for goods and services would start to go up because there would be more money chasing the same amount of goods. This means that things would start to cost more, and the extra money you have would not go as far as it did before. So, the government has to be careful about how much money it prints and makes sure to do it in a way that doesn’t cause the value of the money to go down too much. This helps to keep the economy stable and prevent prices from getting too high.

In less than 30 seconds, I was greeted with a detailed and simplistic answer on printing money and inflation. That is revolutionary. To be able to receive accurate and comprehensive information in such a short amount of time is truly insane.
This AI has also proved to greatly benefit computer programmers, coders, and software developers whose livelihoods are based heavily on writing code for programs. Most people who work in code spend hours upon hours of their day writing and fixing code, hoping that their program works as expected. If there’s an issue or a mistake in their code, it usually takes even more time to detect the problem. With ChatGPT, all you have to do is copy and paste your code, and the chatbot detects the issue, gives solutions to fix it, and gives other tips to improve your code. A task that can be time consuming can be done in seconds due to this AI. It even writes code for you for whatever you ask for.
Although the service has only been out for a couple of months, it has proved to be a possibly generational piece of technology that can change the way we work in a not-so-distant future, similar to how the invention of the calculator changed the way Math was taught. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers claims “ChatGPT is on par with the printing press, electricity, and even the wheel and fire.” However, schools have caught wind of this and have found ways to crack down on ChatGPT, especially for students using the AI to write essays. Several websites like Writer.com have created their own software that detects any content made by AI, and Dutchess Community College has already added to their syllabus when defining Academic dishonesty: “Submitting work containing any content that was generated by an Artificial Intelligence bot or website when not explicitly directed to do so by the instructor.”
With the introduction of this AI technology, we are now starting to see the possibilities, but as far as the future goes, only time will tell in showing us the consequences.