Published On: 6. April 2023Categories: Knowledge

ChatGPT – creativity out of the can

Artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, a text-generating chatbot is currently the talk of the town. It is supposed to understand human dialogues and generate answers that a human could not have formulated better. This naturally appealed to our development team, so let’s get to work on the chatbot and see what it can do.

4 months ago, OpenAI launched a public website showing a common chat window. You type in a question or instruction and after a few seconds a detailed answer appears.

Here are some amazing results and funny mistakes:

Let’s start with a simple experiment – what rhymes with five(9)s? We type:
Write a short poem with the words „five“ and „nine“.

And marvel at the result:
The night grows still, between five and nine Stars shining bright, the moonlight spills divine The world is hushed, the air cool and serene Peaceful and perfect, a timeless routine.

Very poetic. We couldn’t have done it better ourselves.

Continue …
The ChatGPT is not just a bot that generates text for a one-time instruction. You can reply and customize the results and continue.

So we set a slightly more difficult task:
Explain why turning devices off and on again often fixes problems..

And get a full and coherent explanation:
Restarting a device can often fix problems because it clears the device’s memory and stops any processes that may be causing the issue. This allows the device to start fresh and can resolve many software-related issues. Additionally, restarting can also help to reset any hardware components that may have become stuck or corrupted, allowing them to function properly again..

Not bad! Let’s put a tock on it and ask for a summary of the facts via email.
So OpenGPT…
Please turn the explanation into a formal email.

And gets the following suggestion:

A successful e-mail! It is interesting that not only the explanation is copied, but the topic is introduced, the explanation is completed with an example and a summary is given at the end. The text is structured like an e-mail, contains the usual greetings and even the hint who can be contacted in case of questions.

With the help of billions of words, the ChatGPT has learned what an email on this topic would probably look like.

And exactly this probability plays a big role in the quality of ChatGPT’s output data! As you can see in the following example, where the chatbot then stumbles.

Let’s try a math problem:
At the current exchange rate, 1€ equals $1.0639248. Please calculate what $6567657 would be in Euros.

And get calculated:
$6567657 × (1€ / $1.0639248) = 6179339.793€
Therefore, $6567657 is equivalent to 6179339.793€ at the current exchange rate.

The calculation is correct, but the result is generated incorrectly. Only the first three digits are correct and thus the result is over 6000 € too high.

If you repeat the same question with the same values, different results come out. The next answer was 1000€ too low.

Correct would be 6173046.252…€.

There remains to hope that one is on the profitable side of the transaction. But ChatGPT is not a calculator, it is a stochastic text generator. For each new token, which corresponds to about one word or one digit, there are new probabilities.

The probability makes it

In a text there is only a small difference between „What nice weather we have today!“ and „How pleasant the weather is today!“. But in other contexts, such as numbers, a small difference is much more crucial.

It’s not just emails and math that the chatbot has learned with the training data. OpenAI has equipped the chatbot with the ability to correct grammar, summarize difficult text into simpler concepts, know books, give advice, convert movie titles into emojis, and even fix bugs in program code. Among them, generating speeches.

And that brings us to a personal situation that played out at our recent Christmas party

To lighten the mood, I, as a new employee, was spontaneously given the task of delivering the management speech in 10 minutes. In short order, my pulse rate increased. With only half a year of work experience at five(9)s, I had never experienced a company party before and so spontaneously I could think of absolutely nothing to say. It’s clear what it comes down to, I asked ChatGPT to generate a typical speech.

Since I didn’t want to give a speech in English, I also used a translation program, DeepL.

So a speech that was ready in no time, machine generated and machine translated. So you can be curious ….

But when I skimmed over it, I noticed some passages that didn’t meet my expectations. Anyway, time was up.

 

I realized too late that ChatGPT rightly assumes that such speeches are given by people who are familiar with the company’s successes and sales. Never mind, so the speech was funnier than expected and the laughs were great.

Conclusion
ChatGPT can be a useful tool if you know its strengths and weaknesses. And that’s just where we are today. We are facing a very very exciting time!

And maybe in the future all my instructions will be followed by ChatGPT.
The numbers I told you to use in the very first poem, please multiply them.

Because still the chatbot gives rewords …
The numbers „five“ and „nine“ are not numerical values, they are words, so they cannot be multiplied.

 

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