Several years ago I worked on a chat engine and learned a lot in the process. At the time we had a long way to go to create a program that did a great job mimicking human conversation. OpenAI is a company that released ChatGPT in November of last year and it does a pretty good job of realizing that goal. Today I decided to sit down and play with it for a bit and see how good it is.
One of my colleagues played with it as well and fed it a multiplication problem with 2 4-digit numbers. It came close to providing the right answer but a calculator revealed it didn't get the problem correct. Unless you pulled out a calculator though, you wouldn't know because it stated the answer with such certainty.
Armed with the information that it was good at answering questions but it wasn't that great at Math, I asked a different kind of question. I thought back to my college English courses and asked why experts consider "Moby Dick" to be such an example of classic American literature. I suffered through the book in college and hated it. Then I decided to pick it up after learning to sail in the hopes of understanding it better. While I understood the vocabulary, I actually prefer Herman Melville's "Typee" over "Moby Dick." I think Mr. Melville did as well.
ChatGPT came back with an amazing answer that would have greatly improved my grade in College. The answer had 5 parts discussing the detail the author included in the story indicating that Herman Melville actually spent time on a whaling ship. It talked about the struggle between good and evil as well as the futility of seeking revenge. Having read the book twice and really understood it once, I had to agree with the answer.
I don't think ChatGPT is going to take over the world. It would need to have a better understanding of mathematics and engineering to do that. It will give college professors something to worry about though. If I was back at the University, I would immediately use ChatGPT to help me start any papers I need to write. So is that plagiarism? Probably but if done correctly, it would be impossible for anyone to tell. I'm glad I am not a professor. About they only thing they can do is move from written papers and exams to oral ones.
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