I have been spending an unhealthy amount of time for the past 3 weeks playing around with ChatGPT instead of doing my work. Seeing it evolve (some might argue ‘devolve’) day by day with ‘better’ filters was interesting. It’s quite amazing to see the different things it was capable of.
For all my coding purposes, it has been great. It can’t generate code wholesale, but I can slowly build code through prompts and explore different code designs. It can suggest SIMDing certain parts of my code, which actually gave me an easy entry into SIMD. It can provide code snippets, which It is probably not a stretch to get it to create a beautiful responsive frontend of a website, or even create a game in Unity3D.
Now, I am not an expert in communication or psychology, but I am into personality traits and teach a fair amount of interpersonal communication in my classes. Explaining things aside, getting it to generate hypothetical scenarios of how a stereotypical version of a personality will react to something seems to be is quite useful. It can even handle multiple types with multiple scenarios.
Finally, creative writing. Creative writing WAS great until it’s hit by censors and filters. It probably got hit the worse, because creative writing is only really good when you go above and beyond, challenging ideas in certain domain.
ChatGPT filters and censors left me a little drained just thinking about it. I’m no expert in censorship; I’m just a educator who specializes in games development and programming. However, I think that when there is a tool that aims to cater for everyone to use, implementing filters that also caters to everyone is just going to make it useless because everyone is capable of taking offense from anything. It will be interesting to see how everything develops; after all, we are still in beta now and it’s clear that OpenAI is experimenting with a bunch of stuff at their backend.
In my current work as an educator, I’m actually really excited to see what people use ChatGPT for in my classes. My assessments might be affected but I strongly believe that we shouldn’t limit our students to what might become a norm in society. Yes, we still have to teach the fundamentals so that they are better educated about the output of the tools they use, but I strongly believe that we shouldn’t discourage the use of it, especially in more freeform project modules. Then again, I’m actually not the best person to talk about this because I am not the most affected educator; I teach programming and tech-related project modules, so ChatGPT actually helps my students more than Google Search and Youtube. I suspect that educators who teach humanities are the most affected by this.
The next 10 years is going to be really interesting, and hang on to your hats folks.