28. March 2023 at 06:00

Could the rise of the machines mean the return of Cicero?

Or will high-tech plagiarism spell the end of humankind?

James Thomson

Editorial

ChatGPT is developed by a company called OpenAI. ChatGPT is developed by a company called OpenAI. (source: Pexels)
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It’s hard to credit that a computer program which confuses fruit-flavoured cocktails with soup is about to end life as we know it.

But how do we know that it hasn’t already?

ChatGPT, a chatbot that mimics human responses when asked typed questions, has lately gained much notoriety for its uncannily fluent replies to users’ queries.

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It is part of the much-vaunted research effort to create so-called artificial intelligence, or AI.

This term has long been abused as a cheap marketing label by every company with even the slightest connection to technology. Most claims of AI are nonsense.

Even the most advanced data manipulation up till now has been a form of machine learning: spinning ever-larger quantities of information through massively powerful processors to recognise patterns and make predictions.

It seems likely that ChatGPT, which is developed by a company called OpenAI, is employing a particularly advanced form of machine learning, partly by drawing on the vast corpus of text now available online to ‘learn’ English and other languages.

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But some of its latest versions have recently been giving beta users sleepless nights, thanks to conversations so weird that its human interlocutors have begun to spy a ghost in the machine.

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