ChatGPT – Technology revolutionizing content creation
The current technological zeitgeist is all about AI (artificial intelligence), and ChatGPT is dominating the conversation. In the two years since its inception, hundreds of millions of users worldwide have joined ChatGPT, the fastest growing app in history. Its popularity has grown exponentially in the past couple months, begging the question, “What is ChatGPT?”
ChatGPT is an AI powered software application with the ability to assist in a variety of tasks, from analyzing vast amounts of data and generating natural language responses, to fact-checking, content creation and even code generation. Basically, one can type a question or give cues and parameters to the ChatGPT website or free app, and it searches expansive volumes of information on the internet, generating a concise, informed response in mere seconds. It is essentially a language model trained on an evolving range of text data.
In an effort to better understand what it is and how it works, we went to the source itself. In the context of journalism, we gave ChatGPT several simple prompts – one being, “Write a 250-word article citing the benefits to businesses for advertising in print media, specifically community newspapers.” In fewer than 10 seconds, it produced a complete article (see text box to the right).
In the few scenarios we gave ChatGPT, the responses were thorough and concise. However, they were reminiscent of English 101 writing styles (flashback to introduction-body-conclusion) and lacked “personality.” Could this be a cautionary tale for replacing personal with artificial?
One can certainly appreciate the many potential applications, most of which have not yet been explored or even discovered. However, contemplate its granular impact on things like high school students doing English writing assignments or graduate students writing doctoral theses. What about the implications on jobs involving publishing, like authors writing books or screenwriters scripting the next Oscar-winning movie? And what is to become of those whose jobs involve writing intricate code or programming, or even expressive content creation like music composition and digital art?
The world of content creation has fundamentally changed with the technology of ChatGPT, and the applications and implications have not yet come close to being fully contemplated.
To learn more or to explore ChatGPT for yourself, visit https://platform.openai.com.
By Terri Wiebold
