ChatGPT can write essays and answer questions, but can AI take over humans?
“At the end of the day, it’s not really understanding like you and I understand what it’s saying. It’s just saying things that are likely,” he said.
“I’m not too worried about the machines taking over. They make no sense,” he said. He added that machines do not have consciousness or desire to do what humans do.
What he does worry about is that people might get “a little too lazy” and let the tools do their work for them, said the Scientia professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “Scientia Professor” is a title given in recognition of outstanding research achievement.
“It’s not that the robots are going to be malicious and decide to take over the planet. It tends to be much more subtly insidious things,” he said.
“It’s that we give responsibility to machines that aren’t capable enough.”
San Francisco-based research and development firm OpenAI made its latest creation, the ChatGPT chatbot, available for free public testing on Nov. 30. Within a week of its unveiling, more than a million users are said to have tried to make the tool talk.
CHAT’S ROLE IN EDUCATION
He said among the consequences could be the need to transform the way students are taught in schools.
“Are we going to have to stop people from asking exam questions where we ask people to write essays because they can just ask ChatGPT to write them? So how do we actually teach people to write properly if we can’t actually ask them exam questions anymore?” he asked.
Not learning skills like essay writing could mean people could be less intelligent in the future, he said.
However, Mr Jonathan Sim, an instructor at the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, told CNA938’s Asia First on Wednesday that educators should not treat AI tools, including ChatGPT, as taboo.
“It’s a place of learning, so we have to actually teach them how to use it well, how to really take their learning further with it,” he said.
For his part, he prepared an exercise for his students involving the use of ChatGPT. They will have to use the chatbot to generate an essay and critique it, he said.
Mr Sim said that he had tested ChatGPT, and that he would give the essays it writes a B grade at best.
“It’s actually a really good learning opportunity to get students to sit down, learn how to generate it and then ask why isn’t it an ‘A’ essay,” he said, adding that through this practice will teach you how to write better.
Another problem with such a chatbot is that it is the “perfect tool” for people who want to spread misinformation, said Laureate Fellow Prof Walsh. He noted that social media is already full of fake news and ChatGPT will not help the situation.
