OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a chatbot driven by the company’s AI system, near the end of 2022, and it set more than just the internet on fire.
It’s an old idea: type in a prompt, and you’ll receive a response. While ChatGPT had been available for a while, its most recent version was powerful enough to be helpful in a variety of applications, from code generation to authoring essays, poetry, and jokes. It was swiftly dubbed a “tipping point for AI,” and Microsoft just spent billions of dollars in OpenAI.
It’s also a tool with serious limits. Some hailed it for the potential to totally revolutionise the way we work, while others worried it would mean the end of employment in creative sectors and some types of schooling. The tale is convoluted, as is AI in general. Regardless of where you stand on ChatGPT, most people are obsessed with what it can generate. However, according to Laura Huang, a renowned professor of management and organisational development at Northeastern, the future of technologies like ChatGPT lies on the opposite side of the process.
“Most people are concerned about the outcome,” Huang adds. “Few individuals are paying attention to the input. You don’t simply acquire anything out of nowhere.”
If you play about with ChatGPT long enough, you’ll see that it’s far from ideal. It may produce amazingly creative writing—as well as flat-out inaccurate replies. Huang claims that the tool’s strength rests not in the technology itself, but in how people engage with it. ChatGPT is only as imaginative as the prompt it receives, such as the user who requested it to produce a “King James Bible-style biblical scripture detailing how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.”
Huang compares ChatGPT to a more sophisticated version of Google and other search engines, having just joined the Northeastern faculty after five years as an associate professor at Harvard Business School. ChatGPT, on the other hand, takes a step farther than typical search engines. Unlike Google or Wikipedia, Chat GPT can enable direct comparisons between multiple collections of data. It may, for example, highlight how Notorious B.I.G.’s and Tupac’s styles and upbringings vary.
According to Huang, the next step in the growth of technology will be to customise those results depending on the user’s interactions, personality, and background. However, getting to that point necessitates what she refers to as “the occupations of the future,” a new kind of professional who understands how to engage with AI in order to get the most important information. To put it another way, an AI whisperer.
“There will be enormous, enormous potential for individuals who know how to create prompts, particular prompts, writing them in a certain manner, understanding how to massage and analyse what comes out of things like ChatGPT or the next generation of ChatGPT,” Huang adds.
“You won’t receive valuable answers in life if you don’t ask the correct questions,” Huang continues. “You can’t address an issue until you know how to explain it, and the same is true here. You can’t obtain valuable stuff until you understand what’s not useful and how to influence what’s going in and what’s coming out.”
As technologies like ChatGPT grow more common, there will be a greater need for particularly educated personnel who understand how to exploit the technology and avoid the biases that it contains. Huang describes it as a novel mode of communication. People learned to use these new technologies and created etiquette, much as they did with email and social media.
The main difference is that AI whisperers will have to manage discussions with a third, unseen party.
“It’s no longer only about communicating from one person to another, or even from A to B and B to A,” Huang adds. “Now it’s about being able to communicate in this unseen triatic fashion where we’ve got the A, the B, back to the A, and all of these invisible Cs everywhere that we also need to take into consideration and communicate in a way that allows for those ideas and actions.”
You might also be interested in reading, ChatGPT: A study reveals that AI can write academic articles that are suitable for journals—despite some countries banning it
