How to Cut Through ChatGPT Hype and Still Appreciate Generative AI's Potential

You'd have to have been living under the proverbial rock over the last 60 days, not to have heard about ChatGPT, a variant of the GPT (generative pre-training transformer) language model designed to generate human-like text in a conversational context. The technology has received massive attention, with predictions that it will do everything from "reshape humanity" to the old chestnuts of taking over human jobs and/or hijacking democracy. But does ChatGPT deserve all this praise? First, ChatGPT is only as good as what it's been trained on, so it may not be able to generate responses to prompts or situations that are not reflected in its training data. ChatGPT's algorithms haven't been trained on any data after 2021, so if you ask it to write something about current news events, it comes up empty.