Chatbots are expected to be one of the main technologies to boost marketing efforts in 2023. With various sectors seeing the benefits chatbots bring to their service, it’s little surprise to see how popular they’ve become amongst businesses and consumers. The chatbot market is expected to grow by around 25% by 2024; and with this latest chatbot innovation, that figure could very well increase! 

ChatGPT is the latest chatbot to be introduced to the tech world. Since going live in San Francisco at the end of November, over one million people have registered to use the app. 

ChatGPT is a prototype dialogue-based AI chatbot capable of understanding natural human language and generating impressively detailed human-like written text. It is the latest evolution of the GPT – or Generative Pre-Trained Transformer – family of text-generating AIs.

ChatGPT’s main purpose is to provide information and answer questions through a conversational interface. The AI is trained on a huge sample of text taken from the internet. One of the main focuses of OpenAI when creating the app was to make it easy to use. “The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” they said upon release. 

There are approximately 8.5 billion Google searches a day, and one of the reasons the giant of a search engine has become so popular is because it provides users with answers to virtually any question. In a way, ChatGPT is described as an alternative to Google, due to its ability to provide descriptions, answers, and solutions to complex questions including ways to write code and solve layout problems and optimisation queries.

One of the main questions which have been up in the open in the digital and tech world is whether AI could replace humans. With AI’s ability to produce human-like responses and behaviours and ChatGPT’s ability to generate human-like written text, in particular, this has prompted suggestions that the technology could replace journalists. However, it’s important to note that at the app’s current stage of development, critical-thinking skills or ethical decision-making ability that is essential for successful journalism. 

OpenAI say that the app is capable of providing “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers” and solving this issue is challenging because there is no sense in truth in the data they use to train the model. also said supervised training can also be misleading “because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows”.