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This sentence was not written by ChatGPT. Later on in this story, you鈥檒l find a paragraph drafted by the popular artificial intelligence platform (it鈥檚 up to you to decide which paragraph). But, for now, what you read is all human.听

OpenAI, , released ChatGPT in November 2022. Fleshy humans took note: The advanced chat bot could seemingly do it all鈥攚ith a simple prompt via text, it could generate unique tweets, poetry, term papers on Freudian psychology and even, , a children鈥檚 books about an unhappy cockatoo.

Some critics have raised the alarm that students could use ChatGPT to crib entire essays or college applications. Others worry such AI platforms might put certain professionals, such as K-12 teachers or university science writers, out of work. 听

Concerns or no, ChatGPT seemed to carry a message: The age of artificial intelligence is here.听

鈥淲e are at an inflection point for this kind of AI,鈥� said Casey Fiesler, associate professor in the Department of Information Science at CU Boulder. 鈥淚t feels to me like the very early days of widespread adoption of the internet in terms of how impactful this could, eventually, be for everyday life.鈥�

CU Boulder Today spoke with Fiesler and three more technology experts on campus: Daniel Acu帽a, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science; Peter Foltz, research professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science; and Kai Larsen, associate professor in the Leeds School of Business. They touched on what the future holds for ChatGPT and what it might mean for people.

Wait. Sorry. What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is based on OpenAI鈥檚 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3). It belongs to a class of tools called large language models, which human programmers train using huge amounts of text. Put simply, ChatGPT is really, really well read, said Larsen, who鈥檚 .

鈥淟et鈥檚 say you take a human being from around 700 B.C., roughly around when Homer was alive,鈥� Larsen said. 鈥淵ou have him read books and scrolls 24/7 for 2,700 years. That鈥檚 about how much information was put into this thing.鈥�

When prompted, ChatGPT will draw on that learning, plus extensive training sessions with real humans, to draft its responses. You can ask it: 鈥淪hould I apply to the Leeds School of Business?鈥� or,听鈥淭ell me a limerick about Ralphie the buffalo,鈥� and it will reply with surprisingly cogent answers鈥攁ll in a matter of seconds.

ChatGPT has some competition, too: Google announced earlier this month that it would soon听release its own, similar tool, which the company has dubbed 鈥淏ard.鈥�

None of these models are especially new, Foltz noted. In the 1990s, for example, he and his colleagues developed a tool called the that could read and grade student essays鈥攚ith about the same skill as a college professor. He and his colleagues sold the software to the educational publishing company Pearson in 2004.

鈥淐hatGPT is one of the first cases where such a tool has been released in a way that people everywhere can see it and play with it,鈥� Foltz said.听

I don鈥檛 care for limericks. What else can ChatGPT do?

Loads. ChatGPT is adept at writing and editing basic computer code in different programming languages. Fiesler, who studies technology and ethics and has posted several videos about ChatGPT on her , tried something else: She asked the platform to write her a statement of purpose for applying to CU Boulder鈥檚 doctoral program in information science.

鈥淚 said, as part of this statement, include how your research relates to Dr. Casey Fiesler鈥檚,鈥� she said. 鈥淭he answer was really good.鈥�

Larsen, meanwhile, leaned into the whimsical. He used ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, , to create a called Dewey the Unhappy Cockatoo.

ChatGPT is still available for free. But OpenAI and its competitors will inevitably find a way to monetize every interaction with its models, Larsen said. He thinks large language models will excel at some of the most boring tasks of all: writing routine office emails.

鈥淎t its core, it's a communications model,鈥� Larsen said. 鈥淎nytime human beings are communicating with each other, we're going to see opportunities for using artificial intelligence tools to help them communicate faster.鈥�

Why are people freaking out?

Because that鈥檚 what humans do. Admittedly, experts have raised a number of concerns about ChatGPT and its implications for the economy, schools and more.

The AI platform, for example, is a gifted liar. Acu帽a explained, in its guts, ChatGPT works like the autofill feature in Google search. If you give it a few words, it will come up with possibilities for the words most likely to come next, then generate text based on those predictions.

鈥淐hatGPT predicts the next word with some randomness factored in,鈥� Acu帽a said. 鈥淚t does it very, very well.鈥�

That means, however, large language models will sometimes generate text or computer code that looks correct on the surface but is actually completely wrong鈥攊n some cases, inventing facts out of thin air, what AI researchers call 鈥渉allucinations.鈥澨�

Google鈥檚 Bard did just that during a public, and potentially costly, demo Feb. 6: The platform claimed that NASA鈥檚 James Webb Space Telescope had taken the first-ever images of a planet outside Earth鈥檚 solar system. (The honor actually belongs to the Very Large Telescope in Chile, which snapped an image听of an exoplanet in 2004, nearly two decades before James Webb launched.)

What keeps Larsen up, however, aren鈥檛 those sorts of computerized lies, but something, perhaps, much more relatable.

鈥淚t will make it easier to communicate fast, which kind of scares me,鈥� Larsen said. 鈥淐ommunication should be insightful and valuable or make us feel better. But it should not be more frequent. I don't know about you, but I get enough emails.鈥�

Will my children be taught by robots?听

Fiesler has spent a lot of time thinking about what ChatGPT might mean for her own college classes. She acknowledged that students could, potentially, use it to cheat鈥攚riting term papers in less than a minute.听

But she believes that plagiarism is the wrong thing to focus on.听

鈥淚 am more concerned about making sure the students who deserve an A get an A than making sure the students who don't deserve an A don't get an A,鈥� Fiesler said.

Instead, she wants to know how ChatGPT can help her students learn. For an assignment, undergrads might, for instance, be asked to use AI to generate the first draft of an essay, then critique it: What did ChatGPT get right? What did it get wrong? Where did its arguments fall short?

Foltz added that, one day, AI tools might serve as 24/7 tutors for students of all ages. A platform like ChatGPT could give high school students instant feedback on their five-paragraph essays or help middle schoolers with their algebra homework.听

These AI partners might not be as skilled as flesh-and-blood people, but they could help fill a gap for the many who can鈥檛 afford human tutors, Foltz said. He is executive director of a $20-million National Science Foundation institute, which explores how AI can transform classrooms鈥攁nd in ways that seek to reduce the inequalities in education, not make them worse.

Is this the beginning of the machine revolution?

鈥淢y view is that this is a 鈥榙on鈥檛 panic鈥� moment,鈥� Foltz said.

ChatGPT will almost certainly lead to job losses in some professions, Larsen added. The Associated Press, for example, has used AI software to write stories about minor league baseball games since 2016.听

鈥淭he question we have to figure out is how many more new jobs is it going to lead to,鈥� Larsen said.

All four experts agreed that in the ensuing decades, it will become more important than ever for people to learn about what AI can do鈥攁nd what it can鈥檛.

Despite the potential benefits, some people may have concerns about ChatGPT due to a natural distrust of AI. This distrust stems from the fear of machines becoming too powerful and surpassing human abilities, leading to job loss and other negative consequences. For example, the public was initially frightened by IBM's Deep Blue, a computer designed to beat the best human chess players. However, as Acu帽a pointed out, just because a computer excels at one task, such as chess, it doesn't mean it can perform other tasks just as well.

鈥淧eople extrapolated the success of Deep Blue to other human activities. But Deep Blue was better than humans at playing chess,鈥� Acu帽a said. 鈥淎t that time, that didn鈥檛 mean that a computer could also play poker as well as the best players in the world.鈥�

Found it yet?

As for the paragraph written by ChatGPT: It鈥檚 the one above about humanity鈥檚 natural distrust of AI beginning with, 鈥淒espite the potential benefits 鈥︹�澨�

Who did it better, the machine or organic organism, is up for debate. Reached for comment, ChatGPT itself responded:听

鈥淭he future is likely to be a collaboration between humans and AI, rather than one overtaking the other.鈥�