If you are an artificial intelligence fan like me, you have no doubt watched all the seasons of Westworld. Or you might have been an avid watcher of Stanley Kubricks 2001 Space Odessey and HAL’s famous words from that movie when he says: ‘I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.’ That was as human as human can get.
When I first heard about ChatGPT, I was intrigued. I had played around with IBM Watson many years ago and even used it to make some revealing business analyses and business decisions. So what was ChatGPT going to be like? The humanness of artificial intelligence intrigues me and I for one have never been afraid of it.
Humanity’s biggest threat has always been itself. ~Engerraund Serac in Westworld
In fact ChatGPT interacts with you in a very human way. You could have a conversation or you could ask it questions. What I found was that the interactions are certainly very human, I wouldn’t know the difference.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an open chatbot system released just three months ago by OpenAI, a for-profit research lab. You can almost ask it any question. And it will go thru swaths of data from the internet to deliver a dialogue with you. ChatGPT, according to its inventors, is still not perfect and it is still ‘learning.’ The biggest challenge for AI researcher to tackle is the Turing Test. You would have heard of that in the movie ‘The Imitation Game’ that portrayed the life of English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. Turing proposed the following test to gauge intelligence. Can a human conversing with a human and with a computer tell which is which?
UBS Analyst Lloyd Walmsley estimated that 100 million users had used ChatGPT in January 2023 in two months after launch what took Instagram two and half years.
What kind of questions can you ask ChatGPT? Mostly everything from asking it questions in quantum physics to asking it to write a poem. Here are some of the questions I asked.
PM: What is Schroedinger’s Cat?
Chat GPT: Schrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment in quantum mechanics, proposed by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. The experiment describes a scenario in which a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive substance and a poison, such that the radioactive decay of the substance has a 50-50 chance of killing the cat. The idea is to demonstrate the concept of superposition in quantum mechanics, where a particle can exist in multiple states at the same time, and the act of observation collapses the wave function and determines its state. In the case of Schrödinger’s cat, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until the box is opened and the state is observed.
Or I asked it to write a love poem and this is what I got.
Love is a rose, with petals soft and bright,
A flame that dances, illuminating the night.
A treasure to hold, a gift to share,
A feeling that warms, a bond that’s rare.
It’s the twinkle in your eye, the skip of your heart,
The laughter that echoes, when we’re worlds apart.
It’s the comfort you bring, the peace you bring to my soul,
The place I call home, the place I call home.
With you, I am whole, I am free, I am me,
Together we soar, through the highs and the lows.
And though the winds may howl, and the skies may turn gray,
Our love will endure, with you, come what may.
So here’s to the laughter, the tears and the joy,
To a love that is true, a bond we’ll enjoy.
With you, my dear, my heart overflows,
With love and with life, with love that glows.
Interesting isn’t it? Chatbots are based on Natural Language Processing or NLP. Chatbots are being used for internal business communication, enhancing customer service and to boost online commerce.
What is the future of AI? I think so far all of what we thought was science fiction has pretty much turned out to be reality. I wouldn’t be surprised if our future world was a lot like Westworld.
Prabhakar Mundkur is a veteran adperson, a prolific writer and musician. He writes for MxMIndia on and off. His views are personal