ChatGPT

Lopez, German. "Good morning. ChatGPT gives an early glimpse at what artificial intelligence could become." The New York Times column "The Morning" (or "TheMorning") for 8 December 2022, as of 9 December 2022 available, at least on subscription, at link here.[1]

Lede:

Social media’s newest star is a robot: a program called ChatGPT that tries to answer questions like a person.

Since its debut last week, many people have shared what the bot can do. New York magazine journalists told it to write what turned out to be a “pretty decent” story. Other users got it to write a solid academic essay on theories of nationalism, a history of the tragic but fictitious Ohio-Indiana War and some jokes. It told me a story about an artificial intelligence program called Assistant that was originally set up to answer questions but soon led a new world order that guided humanity to “a new era of peace and prosperity.”

What is remarkable about these examples is their quality: A human could have written them. And the bot is not even the best; OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is reportedly working on a better model that could be released next year.

See for advances in real-world AI. Note that a friend of the Initial Compiler sent over a copy of the story about the AI program Assistant and how he (the Initial Compiler) would grade it as a composition from one of his (College Composition) students at Miami University (Oxford, OH). The answer came also from the Initial Compiler as a filmscript analyst, and it was that the story was okay as an early draft but needed development with named human characters and specifics. So a professional reader found the piece mediocre but totally plausible as the work of a student in an introductory writing course, or as part of a pitch by a novice and/or cynical writer of film scripts (someone who'll put no more work into a project "on spec" than demanded).

RDE, finishing, 9Dec22