ChatGPT: The future of AI, or simply rudimentary?

ANITA GAENKO NEWS EDITOR

On the surface, modern artificial intelligence — commonly called “AI” — seems to have already started its takeover. Social media is flooded with AIgenerated images from DALL-E, deepfakes have already begun to fuel misinformation and most popular of all, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its realistic generations of any text content. But before you sign up and start letting the bot type your essays, you may want to understand how exactly it works.

ChatGPT is based on the artificial intelligence model GPT-3, which is one of the most sophisticated AIs available to the public. In simplest terms, the bot has been trained on a giant dataset — about 570 gigabytes — including books, articles and websites. ChatGPT creates text to answer prompts in pieces called tokens, which are a few words each. After each token, it selects the next token based on what it thinks is most likely to both answer the question and fit with the previous token. This introduces an element of unpredictability to the responses. ChatGPT also has other, more complex mechanisms that make it possible to improve its performance over time. Since everything is based on literature created by humans, the responses sound remarkably human. However, this method of text-generation is actually easily detectable. Since ChatGPT produces the “most likely” response, a different AI that’s trained on the same data can deduce whether any piece of text was AI-generated. This isn’t a problem for mundane tasks like writing emails, advertisements and basic code. But when asked for creative work -- even writing books, poems and songs — the bot is nowhere close to replacing humans. songwriter Nick Cave said, in an impassioned blog post against the AI.

ChatGPT is based on the artificial intelligence model GPT-3, which is one of the most sophisticated AIs available to the

ANITA GAENKO OPINION EDITOR

“Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite.” Keep in mind that ChatGPT doesn’t really think for itself; the AI can only base its responses on what is most likely to fit, and it only knows what’s in the dataset.

The dataset itself is a huge limiting factor for ChatGPT. For one thing, there’s a cutoff around September 2020, so the bot has no way of knowing anything that happened after that cutoff.

This makes it useless for current events. Bias and misinformation present in the data can also render ChatGPT’s responses incorrect or even harmful. Finally, despite all of the data ChatGPT is trained on, all of the complex programming behind it and constant improvement through its popular usage, the AI is sometimes simply wrong. It can miss the user’s prompt entirely and even contradict itself. It can print information that sounds realistic, but upon closer inspection, is easily disproved. ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool, made even better by the fact that it’s easily accessible to the public, for free. There’s no harm in using it for outlines and emails. It’s a glimpse into the possible futures of AI — but as it stands, when it comes to creative work, you’re better off writing your own.

“What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work,” singer-

Be serious, people Staff Editorial: Everything should be taken more seriously

On Feb. 7, 2023, police vehicles gathered around Huron High School. Police officers walked into the school building while confusion and bewilderment were amassed through the air. The Ann Arbor Police Department received an anonymous call detailing a shooting threat at Huron.

But this anonymous call was nothing but a hoax. A SWAT call. Similar calls have been made about high schools across the state, resulting in unnecessary lockdowns occurring and students being sent home.

According to the AAPD, the caller stated they were a teacher and said a student had shot another student. They even provided a classroom number. They revealed this through a series of Twitter posts.

Huron had already received two fake threats this school year. One was after the Oxford High School shooting, which circulated on social media. School was closed for a day. The other, on Dec. 9, a lockout was conducted. Receiving such threats, going into lockdown or having school closures, is normalized within our society. One threat, fake or real is all it takes for there to be a lingering feeling. But it’s happened twice already at Huron, and it’s a pattern that students are accustomed to, sparking a “boy who cried wolf” situation.

The issue of “SWAT calling” is both the extraneous variable it adds to the already volatile relationship between school safety and gun violence. Though most 9-1-1 calls are traceable and albeit truthful in their claims, the power of these hoax calls is that there is very little that can be done about them.

It’s unethical and illegal for first responders to not respond as quickly as they can to any call that’s made, but if the call was indeed fake, then the first responders are wasting time and resources that could be used to help real calls. This makes hoax calls an even deeper dilemma. It’s nearly impossible to prevent them. Even though there is an investigation on the spur of hoax calls, a few Michigan High schools received, students should take it seriously. It’s not a joke, because anything can happen to any one of us.

“We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us” — a declaration made by John Winthrop in 1630 about the Massachusetts Bay colony, newly established in the “new world” that is now the United States of America. Since its conception, Americans have viewed this land as a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. American exceptionalism and this belief of inherent superiority carried through its evolution through the centuries, from the westward expansion in the 1800s prompted by ideas of Manifest Destiny, to the colonialism in the early 20th century, to the military efforts in the present day. Yet today, admist these efforts of advancement and the acquisition of power, the American dream is not what everyone experiences. Through the cracks of this facade, millions of Americans face issues like homelessness and food insecurity every day.