Can the new AI tool ChatGPT replace human work? Judge for yourself

There's a new artificial intelligence tool in town, and it's getting massive mainstream attention.

ChatGPT is a program where users can type in a question or a task, and the software will pull information from billions of examples of text from across the Internet, to come up with a response designed to mimic a human.

"One of the key features that sets it apart is its ability to understand and generate natural language. This means that it can provide responses that sound natural and conversational, making it a valuable tool for a wide range of applications."

Or, so says the chatbot about itself — ChatGPT wrote the paragraph above.

How well the processing tool actually "understands" language is not clear. But it is turning heads.

"You can have what seems alarmingly close to a human conversation with it, so I was a little taken aback," said Osh Momoh, chief technical advisor for MaRS, an innovation hub in Toronto.

The tool was created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based research and development firm co-founded by Elon Musk that counts Peter Thiel and Microsoft among its investors. 

ChatGPT has captured the public's imagination because it's so easy to use. It was unveiled to the world just 11 days ago, and has already amassed more than a million users — gaining adoption more quickly than Facebook, which took ten months to hit the same milestone.

But there are challenges even the company behind it acknowledges, including the tendency to generate "nonsense" along the way.

The prompts given to the bot can be silly, like asking it to write a movie script about elephants riding a roller coaster, or complex, like asking it to explain the history of the Middle East. It can write songs, law school essays, and even computer code.

Momoh says the bot is better than anything that's come before at generating text responses to real human questions. He suggests people could use ChatGPT as a tool to enhance their productivity, especially in sectors like customer service, advertising and media.

"In a year or two, I think it will basically impact anything that involves generating text," he said.

While that may raise concerns about artificial intelligence putting people out of work, Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, expects that jobs will just shift as workers are no longer required to complete repetitive tasks.

"Technology tends to create jobs in unexpected areas as it takes jobs away," she said.