How to use ChatGPT and still be a good person

Understand the limitations (and consequences).

First of all, it is important to understand how the technology works in order to know what exactly you are doing with it.

ChatGPT is essentially a more powerful, fancier version of the predictive text system on our phones, suggesting words to complete a sentence as we type, using what it’s learned from vast amounts of data scraped from the internet.

Nor can it verify that what it says is true.

When you use a chatbot to program a program, it looks at how the code was compiled in the past. Because the code is constantly updated to fix security holes, code written using a chatbot could be buggy or insecure, Mr. Christian said.

If you use ChatGPT to write an essay about a classic book, chances are the bot will construct seemingly plausible arguments. But if others have published an erroneous analysis of the book on the internet, it may show up in your essay as well. If your essay were then posted online, you would be contributing to the spread of misinformation.

“They can fool us into thinking they understand more than they do, and that can create problems,” said Melanie Mitchell, AI researcher at the Santa Fe Institute.

In other words, the bot doesn’t think for itself. It can’t even count.

Case in point: I was stunned when I asked ChatGPT to write a haiku poem about the cold weather in San Francisco. It spat out lines with the wrong number of syllables:

fog covers the city,

Brisk winds freeze to the bone,

Winter in San Francisco.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, declined to comment on this column.

Similarly, AI-powered imaging tools like Lensa train their algorithms on existing images on the web. Therefore, when women are presented in more sexualized contexts, the machines will recreate that bias, Ms Mitchell said.