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ChatGPT Takes Text Generation to a New Level
February 2023
As I write this on a bitterly cold December day, the second
day I'm without water in my home because the pipes are frozen, it was only
natural to ask ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) to write a poem about why I'm tired of
this cold weather.
In seconds it came up with this:
The icy winds are blowing strong,
The sky is gray and dull all day long.
I bundle up in coats and scarves,
But still I shiver and feel the cold's sharp barbs.
I trudge through slush and frozen snow,
Hoping for a warm place to go.
But even inside, the air is nippy and chilled,
Leaving me feeling empty and unfulfilled.
I long for sunshine on my face,
For the warmth of summertime's embrace.
I'm tired of the cold, it drains my soul,
Leaving me feeling blue and out of control.
So here's a little prayer to the weather gods above,
Please send some warmth and sunshine with your love.
I'm tired of this cold, it's time for a change,
Bring on the heat, let summertime reign.
ChatGPT nailed it. It's a delightful poem, and an online
check for plagiarism (www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker) tells me it's
original.
I first wrote about GPT-3 a couple years ago, and late last
year GPT-3.5 was released, taking artificial intelligence language generation to
a new level. ChatGPT is a public demo of this new version, with GPT-4 expected
soon.
As we've discussed in previous columns, these AI text
generators are fed gobs of text and use "machine learning" to assimilate the
text. What do they learn? They simply learn what words typically follow the
previous words. It's similar to the predictive text entry on a smartphone in
which it anticipates the next word--but is hugely more powerful.
ChatGPT wasn't taught rules of rhyme and meter. Rather, this
new version was fed poetry and used neural net technology to learn the
principles, such that it can produce poems on demand.
As explained to me by ChatGPT, "As a large language model, I
have been trained on a wide variety of text data and can generate natural
language text in a variety of styles and formats. This includes the ability to
generate poetry, as well as other types of text such as stories, articles, and
descriptions. . . . While I can generate poetry and other types of text, it is
important to note that I do not have personal experiences, emotions, or
creative intentions like a human writer. My responses are based on the patterns
and structures I have learned from the data I was trained on, and I do not have
the ability to add personal perspective or intention to my responses."
After its release on November 30, ChatGPT was so impressive
that it generated huge publicity. People were astonished by what it could do. Wary
of the possibilities, teachers tried entering their essay assignments and exam
questions they gave their students--and ChatGPT earned good grades. Uh oh.
OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, has actually created a tool
that can check whether text has been created by AI or a human (huggingface.co/openai-detector).
It correctly identified the quotation above as created by AI, but when I gave
it the first two stanzas of its poem, it said it was "real." Uh oh.
The range of things ChatGPT can do is astonishing, from
writing jokes to explaining complex topics. Perhaps most impressive is its
ability to write computer programs. For example, it wrote code for a website in
response to this query: "Write code for an ecommerce website using html and
CSS. Include navigation bar, body section, and products with prices."
Still, ChatGPT has limitations, as I found. Most crucial is
that it has no ability to determine the correctness of what it writes. When I
asked for a history of Fairfield, it wrote that the town was founded by
abolitionists. But local history teacher Lawrence Eyre told me in an email that
wasn't quite accurate. He said, "Abolitionists came to Jefferson County from
the 1840s onward, but they didn't reach a majority until Lincoln's close
election victory here in 1860."
There's really no way, according ChatGPT's creators, to fix
this issue because although they attempt to feed it reputable sources, it's
not currently possible to establish the correctness of all the data they use to
train it. Also, the text data they used to train it ends in 2021, so ChatGPT can't
say much about anything more recent.
Still, it's remarkable. So the next time you're experiencing
a challenging day, invite it to write a poem.
© 2023 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D.
E-mail
Jim Karpen
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