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News media versus OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Relevance:
GS 3 Science & Technology.
Tags: #upsc #ChatGPT #OpenAI #competitiveexams.
Why in the news?
A group of news media organizations, including The New York Times, Reuters, CNN and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, recently shut off OpenAI’s ability to access their content.
OpenAI
- The company is best known for creating ‘ChatGPT’, which is an AI conversational chatbot.
- Users can ask questions on just about anything, and ChatGPT will respond pretty accurately with answers, stories and essays.
- It can even help programmers write software code. The hype around ChatGPT — specifically, the breathtaking advancements in the field of AI required to create it — has propelled OpenAI into becoming a $30 billion company.
The face-off between news outlets and OpenAI
- Software products like ChatGPT are based on what AI researchers call ‘large language models’ (LLMs).
- These models require enormous amounts of information to train their systems.
- If chat bots or digital assistants need to be able to understand the questions that humans throw at them, they need to study human language patterns.
- Tech companies that work on LLMs like Google, Meta or Open AI are secretive about what kind of training data they use.
- But it’s clear that online content found across the Internet, such as social media posts, news articles, Wikipedia, e-books, form a significant part of the dataset used to train ChatGPT and other similar products.
- This data is put together by scraping it off the Internet. Tech companies use software called ‘crawlers’ to scan web pages, hoover up content and put it together in a dataset that can be used to train their LLMs.
- This is what news outlets took a stand against last week when The New York Times and others blocked a web crawler known as GPT bot, through which OpenAI used to scrape data.
Why are media companies upset?
- Search engines like Google or Bing also use web crawlers to index websites and present relevant results when users search for topics.
- The only difference is that search engines represent a mutually beneficial relationship. Google, for instance, takes a snippet of a news article (a headline, a blurb and perhaps a couple of sentences) and reproduces them to make its search results useful.
- And while Google profits off of that content, it also directs a significant amount of user traffic to news websites.
- OpenAI, on the other hand, provides no benefit, monetary or otherwise, to news companies. It simply collects publicly available data and uses it for the company’s own purposes.
- But it’s also true that some news outlets probably view ChatGPT as a potential competitor that will profit off their journalism.
- After all, if you ask ChatGPT to describe the coffee and food served by the best cafes on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the answer probably comes from some AI-generated mixture of reporting done by The New York Times’ features team and reviews put out by food-centric publications.
What is ChatGPT?
About
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- The ChatGPT can answer “follow-up questions”, and can also “admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”
- It is based on the company’s GPT 3.5 series of language learning models (LLM).
- GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 and this is a kind of computer language model that relies on deep learning techniques to produce human-like text based on inputs.
- The model is trained to predict what will come next, and that’s why one can technically have a ‘conversation’ with ChatGPT.
- The chatbot was also trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).
Usage
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- It can be used in real-world applications such as digital marketing, online content creation, answering customer service queries or as some users have found, even to help debug code.
- The bot can respond to a large range of questions while imitating human speaking styles.
- It is being seen as a replacement for the basic emails, party planning lists, CVs, and even college essays and homework.
- It can also be used to write code, as examples have shown.
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Limitations
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- The chatbot displayed clear racial and sexist biases, which remains a problem with almost all AI models.
- The chatbot gives answers which are grammatically correct and read well– though some have pointed out that these lack context and substance, which is largely true.
- ChatGPT occasionally produces inaccurate information and that its knowledge is restricted to global events that occurred before 2021.
What is a Chatbot?
About
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- Chatbots, also called chatterbots, is a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in messaging apps.
- This tool helps add convenience for customers—they are automated programs that interact with customers like a human would and cost little to nothing to engage with.
- Key examples are chatbots used by businesses in Facebook Messenger, or as virtual assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa.
- Chatbots tend to operate in one of two ways—either via machine learning or with set guidelines.
- However, due to advancements in AI technology, chatbots using set guidelines are becoming a historical footnote.
Types
Chatbot with Set Guidelines
- It can only respond to a set number of requests and vocabulary and is only as intelligent as its programming code.
- An example of a limited bot is an automated banking bot that asks the caller some questions to understand what the caller wants to do.
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Machine Learning Chatbot
- A chatbot that functions through machine learning have an artificial neural network inspired by the neural nodes of the human brain.
- The bot is programmed to self-learn as it is introduced to new dialogues and words.
- In effect, as a chatbot receives new voice or textual dialogues, the number of inquiries that it can reply to and the accuracy of each response it gives increases.
- Meta (as Facebook’s parent company is now known) has a machine learning chatbot that creates a platform for companies to interact with their consumers through the Messenger application.
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Advantages
- Chatbots are convenient for providing customer service and support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- They also free up phone lines and are far less expensive over the long run than hiring people to perform support.
- Using AI and natural language processing, chatbots are becoming better at understanding what customers want and providing the help they need.
- Companies also like chatbots because they can collect data about customer queries, response times, satisfaction, and so on.
Disadvantages
- Even with natural language processing, they may not fully comprehend a customer’s input and may provide incoherent answers.
- Many chatbots are also limited in the scope of queries that they are able to respond to.
- Chatbots can be expensive to implement and maintain, especially if they must be customized and updated often.
- The challenges of AI metamorphosing into sentient are far in the future; however, unethical AI perpetuating historical bias and echoing hate speech are the real dangers to watch for.
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Way forward
- Tech gurus like to argue that the value of online content only exists in the aggregate.
- Or in other words, ChatGPT could still exist as a high-quality product without CNN’s reporting. But all media publications across the world refused to provide access to OpenAI, it’s likely that the final product would be of lower quality.
- And, of course, if every single creator of online content turned down OpenAI, then ChatGPT would almost certainly not exist.
