ChatGPT? What's all the fuss?

In the Times [Feb 10 2023] the International Baccalaureate has said that it will let pupils use ChatGPT to write essays.

In an article by Matthew Field in today's Telegraph, he writes that "a British artificial intelligence start-up has secured a deal with a Google-backed rival to OpenAI to develop a robot lawyer that can draft contracts as law firms embrace the buzz surrounding ChatGPT.

RobinAI, which has just secured $10.5m (£8.8m) in equity funding, is developing a lawyer bot that can pick apart contracts and suggest new wording to solicitors.

It says the technology can cut the time to review a document by up to 80pc, saving on legal fees."

The article doesn't say if this saving will drop to the lawyers' bottom line or provide a real saving to consumers.

So if you are reading this you may be wondering how ChatGPT might impact your business. Maybe you see it as a threat (will we need fewer lawyers?) or maybe you see it as an opportunity. Depends if you lean towards being a pessimist or an opportunist I suppose.

As the article in the Times suggests, parents already help their children with homework. Children can look up answers and ideas on Google. So what's the real difference? ChatGPT does it quickly and without those pesky ads. Then there is the requirement to choose between half a dozen first-page ranked websites from which we have to navigate and then make another choice.

Perhaps this is why Google is worried (and why advertisers should be).

Do I have to accept the result ChatGPT gives me? No, I can ask it to expand upon its reply, and it does. Personally, I've found, as in real life, that knowing what prompts (questions) to ask provides better quality answers.

Let's agree, real change is often resisted at first. They said the same thing about using calculators in school when they became widely available.

Surely it depends on how the tool is being used and if the final result has important input from the user. I've been using ChatGPT for a month now and simply cutting and pasting the result to a query is easily detected as being AI generated (Google might penalise you for this right now, but will they in the future?).  I use Originality.ai to check for plagiarism and to keep Google onside for the time being.

However, when I start from the article provided and I add my own opinion the same article registers as being 100% user-created content.

Here is the finished article on Lead Generation: 5 Tips to turn your business around.  Tell me which bits were AI written.

ChatGPT saved me a ton of time and helped me brainstorm my original idea. It's like having a pal, a virtual assistant, that I can brainstorm ideas with but one I don't have to pay for. Should personal assistants be worried or should they embrace the technology to provide more value for their clients? How about content creators for social media and copywriters for landing pages, sales letters and websites?

Many of us ask Siri or Alexa to give us answers to queries and when I ask ChatGPT to do the same by voice, wow, some say we won’t need teachers or lawyers.  We will of course for teachers and lawyers to help us conceptualise the result. Knowledge is meaningless without some sort of context.

That is just my opinion. What do you think?

Ps ChatGPT did not write this reply but it could if I wanted it to. Grammarly helped me spell-check this article. Get the picture?

Talking about the picture Dalle-E did produce the graphic for me.