As a rule, hyping something that doesn't yet exist is a lot easier than hyping something that does. OpenAI's GPT-4 language model--much anticipated; yet to be released--has been the subject of unchecked, preposterous speculation in recent months. One post that has circulated widely online purports to evince its extraordinary power. An illustration shows a tiny dot representing GPT-3 and its "175 billion parameters." Next to it is a much, much larger circle representing GPT-4, with 100 trillion parameters.

When OpenAI, the San Francisco company developing artificial intelligence tools, announced the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, former Facebook and Oculus employee Daniel Habib moved quickly. Within four days of ChatGPT's launch, Habib used the chatbot to build QuickVid AI, which automates much of the creative process involved in generating ideas for YouTube videos. Creators input details about the topic of their video and what kind of category they'd like it to sit in, then QuickVid interrogates ChatGPT to create a script. Other generative AI tools then voice the script and create visuals. Tens of thousands of users used it daily--but Habib had been using unofficial access points to ChatGPT, which limited how much he could promote the service and meant he couldn't officially charge for it.

I get more emails than I can handle. Every day, I watch as the unread messages in my inbox pile up despite my best efforts. It's not because I spend too much time responding to the emails that matter -- I spend too much time reading the ones that don't. There are newsletters, brand-outreach spam, press releases, recruiters, social-media updates -- emails that are almost never urgent but still make me feel obliged to check to make sure I'm not missing anything important. Even carefully deployed filters go only so far to keep the ever-growing volume of unwanted emails at bay.

WHAT IF YOUR inbox were jam-packed with AI-generated emails? You may already be on the receiving end of emails written by artificial intelligence, with the help of a human prompter. Austin Distel, a senior director of marketing at Jasper, is one of those humans. Austin smiles as he demonstrates Japer's knack for email composition. "These are tools in my tool belt that helped me perform faster, but also better," he says before sharing that he often uses generative AI to rewrite work emails so they sound like Jerry Seinfeld. Email is one the least authentic forms of communication.

The technology itself is fascinating, but part of what makes ChatGPT uniquely interesting is the fact that essentially overnight, most of the world gained access to a powerful generative artificial intelligence that they could use for their own purposes. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we speak with researchers who study computer science, technology and economics to explore how the rapid adoption of technologies has, for the most part, failed to change social and economic systems in the past – but why AI might be different, despite its weaknesses. Spending just a few minutes playing with new, generative AI algorithms can show you just how powerful they are. You can open up Dall-E, type in a phrase like "dinosaur riding motorcycle across a bridge," and seconds later, the algorithm will produce multiple images more or less depicting what you asked for. ChatGPT does much the same, just with text as its output.

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