A seemingly exciting yet simultaneously terrifying development for not only those in the tech world, but for everyone, called GPT (which stands for Generative Pre-training Transformer), will inevitably change our world as we know it.  

GPT is a type of natural language processing model developed by OpenAI, and it is trained to generate human-like text by predicting the next word in a sequence based on the context of the previous words. Chat GPT is like your average chatbot (like the ones you’d find on many websites) in many ways, except it can code, debate, and create. This sounds like a positive development, as it seems like something that can make everyone’s lives easier. If you “asked” the chat to write a poem, a song, a story, or really, anything else, it would do it. And it would do it in a way that makes it almost impossible to know that it wasn’t written by a human. If you don't believe it, did you notice that the first sentence in this paragraph was written using Chat GPT? 

If you find the idea that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to decipher what is written by humans and bots absolutely horrifying, you are most certainly not the only one. Although artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize many industries and improve our lives in some ways, it has the potential to change schooling, jobs, and day-to-day life in negative ways as well.  
Chat GPT signifies a societal shift toward increasing reliance on bots and artificial intelligence. Now that the technology to create brand new creative products is available at the tip of our fingertips, a whole new world has opened. The future of certain jobs has dimmed, as has the future of school assignments. A new mentality that many hold with the rise of this technology is that “if a bot can do it, why should I?” A White Plains High School student who chose to remain anonymous told me that knowing about this new technology has made them feel excited, and like they can use it to help them with their schoolwork. 

But if you’ve learned anything about trusting what you read on the internet, it’s that not everything online is true. Because Chat GPT often uses what is already published or on the internet to create things, it can give flawed responses. “They can fool us into thinking that they understand more than they do, and that can cause problems,” Melanie Mitchell, an A.I. researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, told the New York Times. For example, when I asked it to write a Haiku (a poem with 5 syllables in the first and third lines, and 7 syllables in the second line), it spat one out with 7 syllables in the first line. There is no doubt that this technology has a long way to go. 

Although it is nowhere near perfectly reliable, the growth of artificial intelligence through more advanced chatbots is propelling our society into a new age of technological advancement, but we must lead with caution. A.I. may have the power to create seemingly man-made products, but it lacks emotions and personal experiences, two things that it can never take away from humans, regardless of how advanced it becomes.