Yahoo Finance tech reporter Allie Garfinkle highlights her latest “interview” with ChatGPT, asking how the OpenAI program will be implemented and what jobs it could potentially replace.
Video transcript
[AUDIO LOGO]
SEAN SMITH: Well, sticking with ChatGPT, talking about experimenting with it, understanding how it works, let’s take a closer look at that, and then also the information it spits out. We want to bring in tech journalist Allie Garfinkle. And Ali, that’s exactly what you did. You had a conversation with ChatGPT. You interviewed ChatGPT. How was it?
ALEXANDRA GARFINKLE: I did, Seana. As it went viral, people were fascinated, obsessed, scared. I’ve been those three things, so I decided to ask him why. I should say that others have done interviews with ChatGPT, but I had a few questions myself. It got pretty existential, but I just wanted to pull out three things that were really striking throughout the process.
The first – number one is actually quite simple. ChatGPT cannot be registered or not. In fact, it took me a bit by surprise. I was like, well, technically, I’m challenging my programming. Can I publish it if it is not registered? The conclusion I’ve come to is you can say yes, but there are certainly other issues with it. Like, for example, I think what I expected was for him to say, “I’m still taped. I’m a machine learning model.” Although it turns out it can’t be either.
The second thing that was really striking was that to get good answers you need to learn how to talk to ChatGPT. We can’t just talk to ChatGPT and say, hey, why are we fascinated by you? Or hey, what do you think? It won’t give you personality. He won’t tell you what he’s thinking unless you give him a little more color – unless you tell him what personality to give you. Say it like a human would say: bring personality, whether you like it or not. ChatGPT will actually respond to the personality you ask it to.
Since Seana, I know you love Reese Witherspoon, I asked him to impersonate Elle Woods when seeing ChatGPT for the first time, and that’s what he came back with. It contains phrases such as “you got it”. And it’s like your part– it’s like your pink highlights bend and bend and break. It was really cute– it was really cute. I was charmed by it.
But that said, despite our… third thing that’s important here is that despite our… how impressed we are with some of ChatGPT’s creative work, I actually found its limitations substantial, in especially when it comes to this type of creative tasks. For example, it’s not putting songwriters out of business anytime soon. I had him do a few songs, but in this particular case I asked him to provide lyrics to a Clash song, and he couldn’t complete the answer. In fact, to date, this is the only thing I’ve asked ChatGPT that it couldn’t give me this answer for.
So while there’s a lot of stuff on ChatGPT that’s great, interesting, it’s definitely not the easiest interview I’ve ever done.
– And you asked ChatGPT to answer a question on my behalf. What was that? How was it?
ALEXANDRA GARFINKLE: You were interested in asking about jobs, what kind of jobs ChatGPT might have come for, and ChatGPT was a bit defensive. What he was saying is that these are jobs that I can help with, these are jobs that I can help with, but he said that he is not coming for these jobs. However, I actually led this answer by an expert who disagrees. He says there are actually implications for call center jobs, knowledge jobs, entry-level jobs. What we see here, Dave, is ChatGPT springing from the party line, so to speak.
And I really like that question because it’s at the heart of why we’re so fascinated. We are afraid of how this will reshape our world. We are fascinated and we are afraid. We are scared and fascinated, and I don’t expect that to end anytime soon.
– We need a him or a she. Like, I don’t believe it. I think that happens with all our jobs, Allie Garfinkle, but I’m old, so…
ALEXANDRA GARFINKLE: Yours as well?
– I worry about you young people. Not us old–
ALEXANDRA GARFINKLE: [LAUGHS]
– Ali, thank you very much.
