Intelligence that lacks common sense

IF YOU have been on an extended leave and only just returned to work, you are likely to hear rumours of a new threat to job security. It is ChatGPT, a robot described by experts as one of the most disruptive technologies ever created.

ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer in full, was released late last year by artificial intelligence research company OpenAI. It is a larger-than-life chatbot that can spit out human-like responses on almost any topic after prompts typed into a text box.

But the limitations that come with the current robot revolution also mean ChatGPT is capable of dishing up some first-class trash.

So if talk about whether ChatGPT is going to take your job raises deep concerns, take a Robo-reality check first. Even though the chatbot can produce large amounts of digital content fast and cheaply, it is only able to produce material that already exists and has no ability to think ahead or “read a market”.

When it trawls though masses of existing information to respond to your query, it is not intelligent enough to separate real from fake and it certainly cannot give you a new perspective or come up with an original idea. Just ask ChatGPT. Prompted to suggest its limitations, the chatbot says it has a “lack of common sense” and though “it has been trained on a very large dataset it does not have an understanding of the world like a human does”.

When queried further, the chatbot admits it only has a limited amount of context. This can “lead to confusion or errors if the input text is ambiguous or difficult to understand”.

ChatGPT adds that it is “trained on a dataset that reflects the biases of the people who created it”, which means it can “result in the model producing biased or offensive output if not carefully monitored”.

And as far as creativity is concerned, the AI tool confirms “it can only generate what it has seen before and cannot come up with creative ideas, original concepts and so on”. Chatbots like ChatGPT will become more sophisticated and able to perform tasks that – today – require a high level of human skill and training. Down the track this could lead to a displacement of workers in certain industries as organisations look to cut costs by automating processes.

As to whether ChatGPT will make humans redundant any time soon, the chatbot’s promise and peril are nicely summed up in its own words – “a powerful tool for natural language processing but it is not a replacement for human intelligence or creativity”.

For now, consider those jobs requiring you to show empathy, a touch of fresh thinking, a dose of creativity and a sprinkling of human intelligence to be safe from the predatory advances of those increasingly competitive robots.