ChatGPT isn’t putting me out of work yet, but it’s a lot of fun • Zoo House News

If you’ve been on Twitter over the past few days, you’ve probably noticed a spate of screenshots from a service called ChatGPT. ChatGPT from the OpenAI group is a conversational tool that allows you to provide prompts to the system, which it responds to in written form.

(You can create a free OpenAI account and try the service yourself. Just don’t identify yourself as a journalist during the onboarding process – you will be blocked. Describe yourself in any other way and you can jump right in. )

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Zoo House News has been busy covering OpenAI lately, with our own Darrell Etherington writing this morning about ChatGPT and how “it’s quickly becoming apparent that how a user interacts with generative models and systems is at least as important as how the underlying training and inference technology”. We also have our eyes on new generations of the well-known and popular AI writing tool GPT-3.

That there is enthusiasm among founders and venture investors for generative AI services like what OpenAI is building is well known. Heck, it’s been a minute since Copy.AI demonstrated that AI writing tools can be harnessed could build eight figure ARR startups. Others are chasing similar magic, and the technology keeps getting better. Hence all the screenshots.

Of course, I had to see if I was in for any short-term employment difficulties. So this morning I ran a little test using the ChatGPT model. The results are below.

Let’s have some fun

First, a reminder that using computers to generate text isn’t new, and this isn’t the first time I’ve been staring into the barrel of a new technical tool that could theoretically be coming for my job. Back in 2014, while responding to news that the AP planned to use automated technology to report company earnings, I wrote the following: