CSA Online well-documented gender and cultural bias to many of its answers: ChatGPT tends to emphasize answers that can amplify gender and cultural stereotypes and misinformation, largely because those prejudices existed in the texts on which it was pre-trained. And then there are the ethics of using a tool to replace human writing. Universities have sounded the alarm about students using ChatGPT to generate answers for assignments, tests or even entire essays. Hollywood writers recently went on strike to try and set limits regarding how movie and TV studios can ask ChatGPT to write scripts. There’s also a lawsuit from well-known authors that accuses OpenAI of training its program using copyrighted material without notifying or paying the original human authors. OK, I’m ready to give this thing a try. How can I actually use ChatGPT? The value of ChatGPT to businesses, programmers and writers (journalists, editors, scriptwriters, social media creators, novelists and the like) is pretty obvious. But here are some less-than-obvious ideas regarding what it can do for the rest of us: Write a speech: Maybe you’ve been asked to say something nice at a wedding, an anniversary, or even a funeral. ChatGPT can help you come up with a topic, and help you write a draft. Paraphrase legal/financial/medical documents: You’re not a lawyer. Nor are you a stockbroker, an insurance salesperson or a medical doctor. But ChatGPT can help you understand the complex jargon which these fields use and simplify it into everyday language. Summarize a long text: Don’t have time to read War and Peace? No problem: ask ChatGPT to give you the short version. Give you a movie/TV recommendation: Type in the title of your favourite movie or TV series and ask ChatGPT for a recommendation. You’ll get a list of titles, ranked according to similarity to your reference and critics’ score. Become your sous chef: You could just read a recipe, or you could ask ChatGPT for tips, hints and “watch-outs” regarding how to prepare a certain dish. It can even write a shopping list for you or create a menu for the upcoming week. So what’s next with this stuff? Tough to say. Language processors such as ChatGPT are developing so fast that by the time you read this article, they may have entirely new capabilities that weren’t even imaginable a few short years ago. Who knows – by the time we publish another piece about ChatGPT, we won’t have to write it…ChatGPT will do it for us. Just like it wrote this one. What…really?!?!? No. Just kidding. But we had you going for a second, didn’t we? CSANews | WINTER 2023 | 43
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