Just how creative can AI-powered chat bots get?

AI is coming and it’s going to change our world ... hopefully for the better. — Needpix.com

ChatGPT. If you haven’t heard of it – then you’re probably not reading this, because you’d have to be extremely poorly connected to have not heard about the new artificial intelligence-enhanced (AI) chatbot.

ChatGPT is built by American company OpenAI to interact in a conversational way. More specifically you can ask the bot anything and it will give you a decently researched answer in simple terms. It’s basically like an assistant that scours the web for answers and then summarises them for you. Except it takes seconds.

And that’s not all. You can have conversations with ChatGPT. You can ask it to write screenplays (a little short but still impressive) and poems. You can ask it to talk in the manner of a New York gangster and it will answer your questions in that tone. I particularly liked the paragraph it wrote in this tone when I asked it for tips on putting a toddler to sleep on a plane.

I’ve used it to summarise text to a shorter form. I’ve used it to spit out loglines (ie, summaries) for prospective dramas I’m working on.

The stuff that comes out isn’t incredible but it’s definitely a starting point. ChatGPT does in seconds what I used to do with a table full of brainstorming writers. To say this changes things is an understatement.

This AI bot has also passed the United States bar and the medical licensing exams. It can take complicated business models and make them simple. It can write a tweet thread on anything you want. It can be used to write code for computer programs. No, it can’t write the code outright but it can give a structure and put the coder on the right path. Remember your mum telling you to take computer science as a subject because jobs in that area are the future? They’re starting to look a bit like the past now.

In fact, when asked about what jobs are safe from AI, ChatGPT came up with a list of eight:

> Caregiving and counselling

> Creative arts and design

> Education and training

> Ethics and legal services

> Entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized business management

> Management and high level strategy

> Outdoor and physically demanding work

> Personal care and service jobs eg: hair stylist and makeup artists.

Maybe we need to rethink our career paths. And as for physically demanding work being safe from AI, that’s only until someone creates an android body to plop the AI into. Then you can strike that one off the list. Yep, the future of the jobs market looks murky.

Actually, OpenAI’s ChatGPT shouldn’t even be one of the big AIs. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has had an AI division for years called Deepmind. Google uses AI in lots of its products – its YouTube algorithm and its Google search algorithm, to name just a couple. And not to be outdone by OpenAI’s chatbot, Alphabet has announced it will release its own chatbot called Bard.

Bard will be released in the coming weeks and it’s hard to see Alphabet’s announcement as anything other than reactionary to the press that ChatGPT is getting. Especially when the media is calling ChatGPT a “Google killer”. Why skim ads and dodgy website for answers when ChatGPT can do all that for you and give you a nice concise answer?

Apparently Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, is looking to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine soon.

Remember Bing? Didn’t take off. But suddenly, all the money that Microsoft poured into Bing to keep it alive over the decades looks like paying off finally.

With Bard around the corner and Bing integrating ChatGPT, it looks like we might finally be getting a better search engine than Google.

And what’s next? Hooking chatbot AIs to Paul Bettany’s voice so we can all have our own personal Jarvis a la Tony Stark? You better believe a version of that is coming. Especially when AI can mimic people’s voices. And recreate their faces. And generate video. All from text.

Yeah, I forgot to mention all that in light of focusing on ChatGPT, but AI is coming and it’s going to change our world. Hopefully for the better.

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Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.