By Charles Miller
This week, I continue to try to find a way to answer all the questions I have received from readers asking about ChatGPT: what it is and what it does. ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot. What is a chatbot? It is defined as a computer program that can hold conversations.
It is abundantly clear that ChatGPT has the potential to be the next quantum leap forward for the internet. In case you are not entirely up on the history of the internet, a couple of the previous quantum leaps were the invention of the World Wide Web—www—and later, the invention of the internet search engine.
The internet existed prior to the 1990s but it was not yet available to the public. Only a handful of universities and government offices were connected to it—a small club in which almost everyone online knew everyone else and the only way to connect one computer to another on the nascent internet was to know each other’s IP address. The World Wide Web provided a framework that empowered everyday computers to access the internet when access to the internet was opened up to the public.
Early internet users were thrilled to see what could be found online, but also frustrated at not being able to find things easily. The next quantum innovation was the emergence of the internet search engine. Companies including Alta Vista, Yahoo, Google, and others created web sites that searched and indexed all the other sites on the internet. Today, there are many different search engines available on the internet, each with its own abilities and features. Engines such as Google are supposed to provide a list of results that best match what the user is trying to find, but that depends on the user knowing what to ask.
Often, the user does not know exactly what words to search with in the search engine. ChatGPT is working to assist with this by chatting with the user in natural language. ChatGPT encourages back-and-forth dialog that is a human-like interaction with the program. The chatbot can not only answer questions, but suggest solutions to problems, write essays, draw pictures, compose music, and play games. Some of these are very much works in progress, but all show potential.
The responses that are provided by ChatGPT are sometimes so human-like, it leads some people to believe the program is alive. The truth is that what is being seen is the astonishing degree to which a sophisticated computer program can simulate intelligence. ChatGPT is not in itself intelligent, but it is clever and is only able to regurgitate knowledge to which it has access.
What ChatGPT has access to is the internet, the vast database that has quickly become the repository for the entire historical global output of humanity; therefore, ChatGPT has access all at once. ChatGPT has already demonstrated an astonishing ability to find just the right thing. That might convincingly seem like intelligence, but it is not. However, it is a vastly improved program for finding and presenting data or other knowledge a human added as a part of the internet.
Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8@SMAguru.com.
