Science & Technology, Australia (Commonwealth Union) – As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to get smarter and move into just about every aspect of our lives, rapidly transforming all industries, ChatGPT has recently taken the world by storm. ChatGPT is a conversational language model developed by OpenAI. It is trained on a diverse range of internet text, including conversations, news articles, and websites, and can generate human-like responses to a wide variety of prompts. The model is based on the transformer architecture and has been fine-tuned for conversational response generation. This allows it to generate answers that are relevant, informative, and engaging to users in a conversational setting.
The University of New South Wales (UNSW), experts in computer science, business, and arts and media recently shared their insights on how ChatGPT can be valuable technology, if treated cautiiously.
The huge buzz over ChatGPT has had rival tech giants announce their own versions of the AI Chat with much focus on how it may transform industries.
Human-like are fed in the form of conversations and other textual content in response to input from users and has proved to be a hit among the public.
There is much speculation on how it will be used in the academic world and if it will replace jobs, and if students may use the technology to do their assignments which is causing concern in the academic world, and many workers of industries have expressed concern to the possibility of losing jobs.
Academics from UNSW Sydney have for many years have studied the significance, and dangers, of AI and are in a good position to understand the possible outcomes of ChatGPT across society.
The year 2022, saw UNSW launch the AI Institute to support the activities of over 300 UNSW academics engaged in AI and spanning all UNSW faculties, with Scientia Associate Professor Haris Aziz as (interim) director and Professor Mary-Anne Williams as deputy director (Business).
The Media Futures Hub, co-directed by Associate Professor Dr Michael Richardson, is a gathering of scholars researching media and emerging technologies with the goal analyzing the atmosphere with the new technology, but to asist build more just futures.
Assistant Professor Aziz indicated that ChatGPT is nothing new, but is generating excitement as a result of the amount of data it draws on, and how it applies data to mark text patterns and form very human-like content.
“ChatGPT is not that different from some very standard, deep learning machine learning technologies that are in operation for many applications,” he says.
Assistant Professor Aziz also stated that the biggest innovation is not particularly the basic idea, but the fact they have collected 570GB of data, which is approximately 300 billion words, powering the software.
He also indicated what has captured the imagination with ChatGPT is that it does not just form one-line answers similar to prior occasions where Chatbots might have done – it is capable to form long-form responses able to summarize a wealth of details on many topics.
While ChatGPT has caused concern in the media as a threat to many white-collar workers, Prof. Mary-Anne Williams, from UNSW’s Business School, is not convinced that will occur.
She points out that the introduction of the personal computer in the late stages of the 20th century as evidence that widespread job cuts are less likely to take place just because of this new technology.
“This is a watershed moment for human-AI collaboration, because anyone that has used ChatGPT can see its potential,” she says.
“ChatGPT and its like are just the latest in a long line of new technologies that can enhance human capabilities, and business, industry and society will change over time as we learn to mitigate the risk and unlock the benefits.”
