Everything you need to know about ChatGPT

ChatGPT is, in essence, a simple online artificial intelligence chatbot created by OpenAI in December 2022. You can ask it a question, and it will answer that question.

For instance, if you ask ChatGPT what it is, this is what it will tell you:

"ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI, which is capable of generating human-like text based on the input it is given. The model is trained on a large corpus of text data and can generate responses to questions, summarize long texts, write stories and much more. It is often used in conversational AI applications to simulate a human-like conversation with users."

You can use ChatGPT to message people on dating apps; to write essays; to create malware (yikes); and more. ChatGPT is ethically complicated, could spread misinformation despite its attempts to stay safe, and is giving people advice for their mental health (not its job). Nick Cave doesn't like it, and Twitter can't stop talking about it. So what is ChatGPT? Here's everything you need to know about the hottest AI on the scene.

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Is ChatGPT the first chatbot ever?

Chatbots have been around for decades, and you might know them best from interacting with any customer service agent over text; often, that's a chatbot. The term chatbot is actually a brutal reimagining of the much more fun "ChatterBot," coined by Michael Mauldin in 1994. But chatbots have come a long way from Maultin's creation of Verbot to OpenAI's ChatGPT. 

Do all chatbots use artificial intelligence?

All chatbots do not use AI like ChatGPT does. Some chatbots simply use keywords to create a response that may or may not be helpful. For instance, if you tell a non-AI chatbot that you didn't receive a package that was marked as delivered, it might encourage you to check the front door (annoying). Other chatbots, like the ChatGPT, use some pretty sophisticated AI. I have had a 30-minute conversation with it about my cat.

Is ChatGPT alive?

Joe Rogen (who admitted to never having tried ChatGPT) likened ChatGPT to that of Ex Machina, a 2014 SciFi thriller in which an AI robot named Ava who turns evil. ChatGPT is not Ava.

But it is intelligent. ChatGPT hasn't been put through a thorough evaluation with the Turing test, a test of a machine's ability to behave like a human. But some researchers believe it has passed the test, nonetheless. If you asked ChatGPT if it is alive, it says: "No, I am not alive. I am an artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI, I do not have consciousness or feelings. I am just a computer program designed to respond to text inputs and generate outputs based on patterns in the data I was trained on."

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How do I use ChatGPT?

Ah, yes, the most simple answer of all. All you have to do is open chat.openai.com in your browser. You'll be asked to make an account and then, boom, you're plugged in. The tool is completely free to use, but there are rumors that we might get a more powerful paid version in the future. If you want to get better at using the tool, there are classes for that, too.