Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a chatbot exploding forth from squiggly radial lines, as was foretold by the prompt. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)
On Wednesday, OpenAI announced ChatGPT, a dialogue-based AI chat interface for its GPT-3 family of large language models. It’s currently free to use with an OpenAI account during a testing phase. Unlike the GPT-3 model found in OpenAI’s Playground and API, ChatGPT provides a user-friendly conversational interface and is designed to strongly limit potentially harmful output.
“The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” writes OpenAI on its announcement blog page.
So far, people have been putting ChatGPT through its paces, finding a wide variety of potential uses while also exploring its vulnerabilities. It can write poetry, correct coding mistakes with detailed examples, generate AI art prompts, write brand-new code, expound on the philosophical classification of a hot dog as a sandwich, and explain the worst-case time complexity of the bubble sort algorithm… in the style of a “fast-talkin’ wise guy from a 1940’s gangster movie.”