Making Friends with AI

Introducing ChatGPT!

The Revolutionary New Tool for Conversation Generation

Cassie Kozyrkov
6 min readDec 8, 2022

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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.

This might sound like a drawback, but it actually makes ChatGPT incredibly useful. Because it isn’t tied to the constraints of reality, ChatGPT can engage in completely imaginary conversations and provide creative, out-of-the-box responses.

For example, you could ask ChatGPT what it would do if it could fly, and it might respond with something like “I would soar through the skies like a majestic eagle, feeling the wind beneath my wings and the freedom of flight.” This type of response would be impossible for a human to come up with, but it’s perfectly within the realm of possibility for ChatGPT.

ChatGPT allows us to explore possibilities that are beyond the constraints of our everyday reality, and that can be incredibly powerful.

So, why use ChatGPT if its responses only touch reality at a tangent? Because sometimes, it’s exactly this type of creative, imaginative thinking that we…

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Cassie Kozyrkov

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