What Is Chat GPT?

By Nadine A. Jack

Within the last decade, artificial intelligence has been advancing at an unprecedented pace. One particularly exciting development is the emergence of large language models, like Chat GPT. These models use machine learning techniques to analyse and understand language, allowing them to engage in conversation and answer questions with a level of sophistication that was once thought to be the exclusive domain of human beings. *Cue The Terminator soundtrack.

So, what exactly is Chat GPT? Put simply, it’s a computer program that uses natural language processing to understand and respond to human language. It was publicly launched in November 2022 and has been disrupting every industry since then. Google is clutching its pearls, SEO experts are having existential crises, and C-average students are finally getting As

The “GPT” in the name stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” which refers to the specific type of architecture that the model uses. Essentially, the model has been trained on a massive corpus of text data, allowing it to understand the nuances of human language and generate responses that are contextually appropriate and grammatically correct.

Using Chat GPT is fairly straightforward. There are a number of different applications and platforms that allow you to interact with the model. One of the most popular is OpenAI’s GPT-3 Playground, which is available on the OpenAI website. Here’s how to get started:

  1. Go to the GPT-3 Playground on the OpenAI website.
  2. Click the “Start Playing” button to create an account (or log in with a Gmail account.)
  3. Follow the prompts to verify your identity and create a password.
  4. Once you’ve created an account, you’ll be taken to the Playground interface. Here, you can type in any question or prompt that you like, and the model will generate a response based on its understanding of the language.

It’s worth noting that Chat GPT is not perfect, and its responses can sometimes be nonsensical, off-topic or on rare occasions, offensive. However, the model is constantly learning and improving, and it’s amazing to see how well it can handle a wide variety of tasks and queries. 

Also, as someone with a working knowledge of AI Conversation Design, I can easily discern each programmer’s coding ‘voice’ with every regenerated response. So while I wouldn’t recommend using Chat GPT to write an entire academic paper in APA style, it can be used with a few tweaks to produce several types of written content.

Here are just a few examples of what you can do with Chat GPT:

  • Ask it to explain complex topics in age-appropriate terms.
  • Use it to generate creative writing prompts, and it’ll come up with a series of intriguing ideas that you can use to spark your imagination.
  • Give it a list of ingredients, and it will generate a recipe for you to follow.
  • Ask it to summarise a long article or piece of text, and it will give you a concise summary that captures the main points.
  • Use it to generate text for marketing copy, social media posts, or other forms of written content.

Overall, Chat GPT is an incredibly powerful tool that has the potential to revolutionise the way we communicate with computers. 

Whether you’re a writer, a student seeking research, a marketer, or just someone who wants to explore the boundaries of artificial intelligence, Chat GPT is a fascinating and endlessly entertaining technology to experiment with. 

So why not give it a try and see what it can do for you? ( I did, by using it to research this topic :D)