Making Friends with AI

Introducing ChatGPT!

The Revolutionary New Tool for Conversation Generation

Cassie Kozyrkov
6 min readDec 8, 2022

--

Guess where the title for this blog post came from… this is ChatGPT in action! Try it here, no tech skills needed: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

Today, I want to demystify ChatGPT — a fascinating new application of GANs* (Generative Adversarial Networks) that has been generating a lot of buzz in the AI community.

Image created by the author.

For those unfamiliar with GANs, they are a type of neural network that uses two competing networks — a generator and a discriminator — to create realistic-looking outputs. The generator creates fake outputs, and the discriminator tries to tell the difference between the fake outputs and real-world data. Through this back-and-forth process, the GAN is able to produce outputs that are indistinguishable from real data.

ChatGPT takes this concept and applies it to text-based conversation. It uses GANs to generate responses to input text, allowing it to engage in natural-sounding conversations with humans.

But here’s the catch — ChatGPT’s responses only touch reality at a tangent. While they may sound convincing, they are ultimately fictional creations of the GAN.

--

--

Cassie Kozyrkov
Cassie Kozyrkov

Written by Cassie Kozyrkov

Chief Decision Scientist, Google. ❤️ Stats, ML/AI, data, puns, art, theatre, decision science. All views are my own. twitter.com/quaesita