ChatGPT: Risks and benefits of using AI

Artificial Intelligence is one of the latest innovations that changed the game. Throughout the past few years, AI has seen increased growth in useability and popularity. One of the newest AI technologies today is ChatGPT, a chatbot that can create human-like responses based on prompts typed in by the user. It’s said to be the next Google but is this claim true?

In this QWERTYLABS blog, you’ll learn more about ChatGPT, from what it is and how it’s used to its implication in today’s SEO content marketing landscape. Find out some of its benefits and potential consequences and decide whether to use it. Let’s get started!

What is ChatGPT?

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or ChatGPT, is a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence. It uses advanced language learning techniques to understand text inputs and generate human-like responses in return. This new technology makes search queries more conversational as you can type your questions on the chat box as you would on a messaging app with a real person. Then, the responses you’ll get in return will look like it’s been typed by a human instead of an AI.

OpenAI developed it, a startup based in San Francisco, co-founded back in 2015 by famous entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Sam Altman. It’s also the same company that created DALL-E, the text-to-image generator. The startup built ChatGPT or GPT-3.5, an upgrade from OpenAI’s previous GPT-3. This new version is a type of large-language model (LLM), meaning it’s programmed to understand human language through data input. In return, it can generate responses that fit human understanding.

What is the Large Language Model?

Large-Language Model (LLM) is a subsection of machine learning. It involves deep-neural networks of upwards of a billion, each trained to process hundreds of billions of pages to predict which sentences or words will appear next. This model is what ChatGPT uses to produce the human-like responses that users get when they type their queries on the chatbot.

How to use ChatGPT

The great thing about ChatGPT is that anyone can access it online for free. You can treat it as your regular search engine wherein you type your query and receive information in return. However, OpenAI suggests inputting statements to get better answers from ChatGPT instead of broken keywords. Once the bot answers your query, you can ask follow-up questions to further help you with your main inquiry. You can continue this conversation until you close the browser or restart the thread. Before you can talk to this advanced AI, however, OpenAI will require you to create an account. You can easily do this by signing up using your Google or Microsoft account.

How is ChatGPT trained?

ChatGPT was trained using something data scientists, and machine-learning engineers call ‘semi-supervised learning’, an algorithm trained on datasets consisting of labelled and unlabelled data. It uses the labelled data at hand to formulate a hypothetical prediction of the eventual output of the unlabelled data.

To gain the huge amount of unlabelled data required to train ChatGPT’s Large-Language Model, data scientists extracted information from the internet using web scraping. Now, fine-tuning a model of this capacity with this huge amount of data is no easy feat. Moreover, although OpenAI hasn’t publicly revealed how it pulled it off, it’s no secret that it used outsourcing techniques.

What does ChatGPT have to offer?

With all the technicalities out of the way, it’s time to find out the benefits his advanced chatbot offers. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest benefits of using ChatGPT here:

1. It provides answers to questions

Of course, ChatGPT provides answers to questions, much like how a search engine gives relevant information based on the user’s keywords. However, the former makes it different because it conversationally presents information. Asking it seems like chatting with a human as opposed to AI. This makes the information easier to understand and digest than just being presented as search results.

2. It helps you fully understand your inquiry 

Aside from being conversational, ChatGPT also makes it easy to understand your inquiry by allowing you to enter follow-up questions. You can continue sending these questions until you get a full understanding of your inquiry or until you restart your browser.

3. It offers quick responses

It’s impressive how fast ChatGPT provides its users with relevant information about their queries, considering that it has tons of data to scour. Its fast response time makes it feel like you’re chatting with a real person.

4. It helps increase productivity

Aside from being used as a search engine, ChatGPT can do many text-based tasks like code a website or write long-form content on a specific topic. This capability immediately made people think of using it to increase productivity. For example, if students need to write an essay, they can easily chat with ChatGPT and learn everything they need to know about their topic. It’s also worth noting that ChatGPT features high-quality web design, as evidenced by its easy-to-use and sleek user interface. This makes the platform more user-friendly even though it’s a fairly new kind of technology.

Potential consequences of using ChatGPT

Yes, ChatGPT provides tons of benefits to its users. However, it can be a double-edged sword when used incorrectly. At the time of writing, ChatGPT still needs to polish some rough edges. With that in mind, using this kind of technology can lead to potential consequences too, such as:

Misinformation leading to harmful results

One of the most glaring problems with ChatGPT is that it sometimes provides inaccurate information. After all, the data it provides will be AI-generated, unlike, let’s say, Google, which scours the internet to find the best result for your query. That’s why one can’t argue that this chatbot can replace Google, as it isn’t a search engine.

This could be more harmful when your query involves something serious like how to treat a certain injury. You could worsen the situation if the chatbot mistakenly gives you an inaccurate remedy. This is why it’s also important always to fact-check the information provided by this chatbot through Google or other search engines you trust.

Loss of sense of ownership

Abusing the advanced technology this chatbot offers in the context of writing can lead users to lose a sense of ownership over their output. Although it can be efficient to take ideas or even copy the generated sentences or phrases from ChatGPT, it won’t fulfil you since the information isn’t originally yours.

This can especially affect students who are using ChatGPT to write their essays for the sake of finishing them, as they won’t bother making their ideas. Writing is all about expressing oneself. If you’re going to rely fully on what the AI will generate based on what you entered in the chat box, your output will start losing personality. 

Conflict with SEO strategies

Entirely relying on a chatbot like ChatGPT may provide conflict with the tricks you’ll use to boost your SEO strategy. Search engine optimisation is all about letting your page rank high on the results page, and one of the strategies to achieve this is writing original content. If you’re only going to use AI-generated information, you won’t be creating optimised content. As a result, Google won’t see your website as an authority, and you’ll have lesser chances of ranking.

Biassed information

ChatGPT doesn’t have its perspective and only takes information based on the already present data. So if the data ChatGPT gathered is biased, it won’t have the understanding to realise this and still provide biased and possibly misleading answers. For example, people have seen discriminatory and harmful results in some of its outputs. These could offend users and negatively influence those who aren’t that educated on the subject. 

This is a big challenge OpenAI is still trying to solve. However, they’ve publicly admitted this mistake and called it ‘biased behaviour’. At the time of writing, the developers are trying to solve this problem by encouraging ChatGPT’s users to leave feedback and suggestions when the platform provides bad outputs.

Lack of motivation to write

The ability to generate a unique output through AI may cause some users to lose motivation to write and produce original content. Knowing you can generate information in a snap can make users lazy and fully rely on AI. This can then be harmful since it doesn’t provide the correct information all the time.

Limitations of ChatGPT

Since ChatGPT has only been released recently, it could still use some improvements. At the time of writing, here are some of the most common limitations that users have noticed with the chatbot:

It can’t distinguish fact from fiction

As previously stated, ChatGPT won’t always provide you with the correct answer to your query. That’s because it’s more focused on predicting which words and sentences will go next based on what you entered in the chat box. ChatGPT doesn’t work like Google, where it scours the internet and crawls various web pages to find the best response to your inquiry. 

OpenAI acknowledges this issue, noting on its website that it ‘sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers [,] … is often excessively verbose ... [and] will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biassed behaviour.’

It has limited knowledge

ChatGPT isn’t all-knowing. It bases its answers on the data it receives from users, meaning it can’t produce new writing styles because everything it knows is templated. And while it can write poetry and mimic writing styles, it won’t be able to produce content as creative as humans do since it doesn’t have human knowledge derived from personal experiences.

Only a limited number of users can access it

One of the glaring issues that ChatGPT currently faces is the limited capacity of users that can access it at a time. Sometimes, you’ll be directed to a screen that says, ‘ChatGPT is at capacity right now’ when accessing it. This is because servers required to run this advanced AI are expensive. Moreover, it’s just one of the consequences of being a free-to-use tool.

It won’t always understand you

The thing about using ChatGPT is that it won’t always understand you. Sometimes, you must type in specific questions to get specific answers, as the platform doesn’t have intuition. One mistake in your question can drastically change its answer, so always be specific with your statements.

Who’s competing with ChatGPT today?

Because of ChatGPT’s initial success, other companies have decided to create their advanced chatbots to compete in the market. These include the following:

Google Bard

The world’s leading search engine won’t be left out of the competition for providing users with information. That’s why in February 2023, Google launched its own AI chatbot called ‘Google Bard’. It works like ChatGPT, where searching for queries feels more like a conversation than a one-way inquiry. Furthermore, it aims to answer queries the company calls ‘NORA’, which stands for ‘no one right answer’. Just like ChatGPT, Google wants its users to learn more about their queries through this tool by giving follow-up questions.

Facebook Blender

A project by the gigantic social media platform Facebook Blender works similarly to ChatGPT, wherein it’s a chatbot that can pull up relevant information to respond to users’ queries. It’s also the first chatbot to get the ability to simultaneously build long-term memory, allowing you to access ongoing conversations for weeks or even months.

Can ChatGPT replace Google?

Technically speaking, ChatGPT isn’t a search engine, so it wouldn’t make sense for it to replace Google. However, it does a great job of gathering and presenting information to the user in a conversational manner. It can come off as more user-friendly than Google’s search results page. With ChatGPT, you won’t have to go through numerous sites to find the answer to your question—it’ll already be presented and explained to you in a way you’d understand best.

However, ChatGPT still has issues that need to be polished first, such as its occasional misinformation and biased takes, before it can be as reliable as Google. At the end of the day, you still need Google or any other search engine to verify any kind of information you can get from ChatGPT.

Should you use ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is free to use, and you can try it out yourself. After all, how it produces information in a snap is a technical marvel. Just be sure to remember the limitations and the potential consequences that can happen when you use this advanced artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, if you want to learn more about the latest trends in SEO, feel free to contact us or check out our services here at QWERTYLABS Inc.