A diverse group of locals brought their curiosity and questions to an interactive talk on ChatGPT for Business, on Thursday night (June 8).

Topics ranged from whether artificial intelligence (AI) will overtake human intelligence to how to best use the tool.

Waitaki District Libraries digital and information services librarian, Debbie Price-Ewen, led the wide-ranging and informative discussion at the event hosted by Ōamaru’s The Business Hive, supported by library manager Jenny Bean.

The focus was on the benefits and pitfalls of OpenAI’s famous ChatGPT, with a broader discussion around the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) tools which are increasingly available to the public.

Debbie’s introduction laid a solid foundation for the conversation, and there were smiles all round as she informed the audience that she had used ChatGPT to help put together her presentation and would be using it live throughout the evening to help answer questions.

She explained her initial interaction with the “chatbot” was through asking it: “What are you?”. Acknowledging her question was ‘to the point’, she noted ChatGPT itself has extremely good “manners”.

Debbie quickly covered key information about ChatGPT, that the GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” which refers to “a class of neural language models developed by OpenAI that use a transformer architecture”.

What is transformer architecture? ChatGPT’s response: “a type of neural network architecture used primarily in natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as language modelling, translation, and text generation”.

Debbie shared her experiences and the merits of using ChatGPT to brainstorm business ideas, creating a detailed business plan, generating names for a business, product or service and how it “can point you in directions you may not have thought of”.

Other areas where ChatGPT can support businesses is by providing customer service support (helpdesk support via chatbots are becoming increasingly familiar), translating content into multiple languages, marketing, generating content (social media posts, product descriptions etc…), career and job advancement from mapping out a career, to exploring entrepreneurial opportunities and even research and development, she said.

ChatGPT responds to “prompts”, and the way we format and frame our questions or the prompt, directs the form of its response, Debbie said.

Better prompts deliver better responses. They need to be “clear and concise”, “provide context”, “use complete sentences” and “avoid technical jargon”. 

Jenny Bean noted ChatGPT is a significant step-change in our relationship with technology, identifying areas of concern including the intended (but not validated by OpenAI) age limit. 

Debbie confirmed OpenAI’s terms and conditions included an age restriction of 18 (or 13 with a parent or guardian’s consent).

Some of the concerns included young people’s unrestricted access to chat with ChatGPT long after their peers are asleep as well as them receiving age-inappropriate responses to their prompts, Jenny said.

Extrapolating on these concerns, Debbie disclosed some cautionaries when using ChatGPT. She recommended fact checking and recognising its “AmericaniZed” language and culture. We also need to recognise our own biases in our questioning, as well as exploitation of human workers that are paid (a pittance) to filter out obscene and traumatic content. 

Questions from the audience included how misinformation is handled, how defamation laws might apply, privacy, copyright, where ChatGPT gets its information and whether it stores personal information.

Nicolas Erdody, founder and director of Open Parallel, a globally distributed team of specialists who offer solutions for the data science revolution, likened ChatGPT to a scientific calculator being able to figure out the square root of a number in seconds. 

“It is not a black box of magic,” he said.

Others acknowledged privacy concerns but questioned AI’s ability to overtake human intelligence, noting “it doesn’t have curiosity”, “it doesn’t have empathy”. 

Further discussion highlighted the usefulness of the tool as a time-saver for condensing information, creating content quickly, and translating information written in other languages.

As to where it gets its information from - its official training data was based on information available up to September 2021.

When Debbie asked ChatGPT whether it stores people’s data, it responded: 

“As an AI language model, I don't have the capability to store or retain information about individuals unless it has been explicitly shared with me in the course of our conversation. 

“I'm designed to provide on-the-fly responses and do not have access to personal data once the conversation ends.

“Remember to avoid sharing sensitive personal information online and be cautious while interacting with AI systems or any other online platforms”.