Larry Magid: I asked ChatGTP to help me write an AI safety guide. I was impressed with results, but it felt dishonest to pass the work off as my own
In my capacity as CEO of ConnectSafely, I’m working on a parents guide to generative AI, and, naturally, I turned to ChatGPT for some help. It gave me some good advice, which I’ll get to later, but first some general background on “generative artificial intelligence” (GAI).
AI has been around for a long time, but generative AI, which can create new content, including text, images, music and even computer code, is relatively new. Just in the past few months we’ve seen the emergence of some impressive early models including ChatGPT from OpenAI, Google Bard and the new Microsoft Bing. Each of these relies on what is called a “large language model” that accesses and analyzes vast amounts of data that it finds online and uses it to generate new content. Microsoft’s Bing AI is a major investor in OpenAI, whose technology is used in its Bing AI product.
Answers questions, writes poems, plans vacations
GAI systems both speak and understand natural language. You can ask it a question or to perform a task the same way you speak to a person. For example, you could say, “what is the capital of France,” but you can also say, “write me a poem about a boy with curly hair.” You can get quite specific, such as “write me a story about a Jewish girl from China and her friend from Mexico” and you can even have it write songs about specific people. You can also use services like ChatGPT to plan a vacation. I just asked it to plan a road trip between Las Vegas and Rimrock, Arizona, and it gave me a very detailed itinerary. I then asked it to compare a couple of different attractions and was impressed with the level of detail.
These services can also write essays, which brings up some issues for educators who worry about students using it rather than doing their own writing.
My main concern with these services is that they don’t always cite their sources, and they do make mistakes. When I first asked it about myself, I found several mistakes, which others might not notice. It correctly listed several publications I’ve written for but added in a couple that were not correct. At one point, it had me winning an Emmy, which, sadly, never happened.
