ChatGPT stands for “Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer.” That’s a complicated way of saying it’s a large language model, which means it’s a program that has access to the entire internet of things — and you can talk to it conversationally.
You can ask it to do a lot of things — it can answer questions, write based on prompts and more. It’s trying to emulate talking to a human, essentially. It talks in first person, and it also tends to pause while it’s replying to you, almost like it’s thinking.
It does have some limitations, too. ChatGPT won’t get too political with you, and it won’t discuss offensive topics. The data set that ChatGPT uses was curated by humans, and as we use it, we’re teaching it and giving it feedback. That’s the whole concept: machine learning.
At the end of the day, AI can be a helpful tool in many cases, but it’s not a total replacement for human intelligence. It can help you with certain tasks, but you can’t rely on it to be fully accurate.
Michael Stuckey