What Are ChatGPT and Its Friends?

Chapter 1. What Are ChatGPT and Its Friends?

ChatGPT, or something built on ChatGPT, or something that’s like ChatGPT, has been in the news almost constantly since ChatGPT was opened to the public in November 2022. What is it, how does it work, what can it do, and what are the risks of using it?

A quick scan of the web will show you lots of things that ChatGPT can do. Many of these are unsurprising: you can ask it to write a letter, you can ask it to make up a story, you can ask it to write descriptive entries for products in a catalog. Many of these go slightly (but not very far) beyond your initial expectations: you can ask it to generate a list of terms for search engine optimization, you can ask it to generate a reading list on topics that you’re interested in. It has helped to write a book. Maybe it’s surprising that ChatGPT can write software, maybe it isn’t; we’ve had over a year to get used to GitHub Copilot, which was based on an earlier version of GPT. And some of these things are mind blowing. It can explain code that you don’t understand, including code that has been intentionally obfuscated. It can pretend to be an operating system. Or a text adventure game. It’s clear that ChatGPT is not your run-of-the-mill automated chat server. It’s much more.

What Software Are We Talking About?

First, let’s make some distinctions. We all know that ChatGPT is some kind of an AI bot that has conversations (chats). It’s important to understand that ChatGPT is not actually a language ...