I’M NO CHATBOT! 

COST-of-living crisis, fuel poverty, soaring inflation. Can things get any worse? Yes! Because step forward the sophisticated chatbot, ChatGPT, that can write essays, stories and even makes a pretty good stab at newspaper columns. But it’s not perfect, our jobs are safe for now. 

 But let’s get something clear straightaway. I write this column and all my psychological crime novels. Me! The one with my photo above. Not Metal Mickey Mouse. Just see him handle all the psychological curve balls and plot twists of crime writing!  

 Readers tell me I have a good sense of humour (I regularly get great comments about it to my website!). So I asked ChatGPT to write jokes, but not one was funny. They had the form, but not the content of a joke. It’s like any other technology: a tool with certain uses we humans can put it to, and many things it can’t do. 

 Nonetheless, it’s the chatbot that helped Jeremy Hunt write his speech on the economy and helps millions of others with homework, computer code, essays, poems and business presentations. 

 While it has been banned from universities and even a machine-learning conference, it has spawned versions that can give you bespoke recipes, build apps and even co-host a podcast. And has passed US medical licensing, MBA and Bar exams.   

 Indeed, a professor from the Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania put it to work on its MBA final exam. It did an ‘amazing job’ answering basic business questions on case studies but less so on basic maths and advanced analysis, according to the study’s author, Christian Terwiesch. Final grade? B or B minus. 

 It also makes for a passable lawyer, having earned a C+ from the University of Minnesota on its Bar exam, although that would have led to a real student being placed on academic probation. Like any good polymath, it also passed the US medical licensing exam. 

 Basically, ChatGPT is an AI programme called a large language model, trained on billions of words from the internet and then refined by humans. Its power comes from being able to write sentences because it can accurately predict the next word to write, like auto-complete but on a huge scale. Users can ask it questions in a prompt box and it returns the answer almost instantly. 

 However, ChatGPT can also deliver quite a lot of inaccurate information, requiring several questions to arrive at some semblance of the truth. 

 Its source material is the internet – the place where you can find every loony idea, conspiracy theory, oversimplification, common misconception etc. Great, you’d think, on what Jeremy Clarkson would probably call a cellular level. On another level – the bit with the brain – you might wonder whether this wasn’t just smoke and mirrors. 

 Even if what it finds is right, there’ll be no originality, surely the most important output of ‘real’ intelligence. However, this first test does at least show it’s supremely suitable for the output of practically every politician out there. 

 So, couldn’t we use ChatGPT to replace our own useless politicians who make up policy on the hoof with no reference to reality or facts? It couldn’t do a worse job… 

Nora Johnson’s 11 critically acclaimed psychological crime thrillers (www.nora-johnson.net) all available online including eBooks (€0.99; £0.99), Apple Books, audiobooks, paperbacks at  Amazon etc. Profits to Cudeca cancer charity.  

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