On November 30, 2022, Open AI, a U.S.-based IT company, launched Chat GPT, a chatbot that enables people to use its AI model, GPT-3.5, based on text.
Anyone with a PC or smartphone can access Chat GPT and utilize the function of GPT-3.5 with a simple chat, which is available for free. Thanks to such ease of use, Chat GPT surpassed 100 million monthly active users worldwide within two months of its launch.
What is Chat GPT?
This is the response from Chat GPT when we asked for an introduction to The UOS Times.
The UOS Times is a student-run newspaper based at the University of Seoul (UOS), South Korea. Founded in 1957, the newspaper has been providing news and analysis to the student community for over six decades. It covers a wide range of topics including campus news, sports, entertainment, and politics, both on and off campus.
The UOS Times is committed to providing reliable and accurate information to its readers, while also fostering a community of critical thinking and discourse. With a team of dedicated student journalists, The UOS Times is a valuable source of information for students, faculty, and staff at the University of Seoul and beyond.
Chat GPT presents answers to users’ needs or questions. However, unlike conventional search services that require users to find, compare, and evaluate each piece of information, Chat GPT performs such process.
Chat GPT is also different from existing chatbots, where programming languages have developed through supervised learning. Humans directly teach their AI in most cases. However, Chat GPT AI language was developed through learning itself. Like humans, AI repeats practice, suffers errors, and verifies them again. Chat GPT is an AI that continues to learn. So, even if one asks the same question repeatedly, they do not get the same answer. The answer continues to change and develop as AI presents a new answer based on the accumulated data.
As long as it can be expressed in language and text, Chat GPT produces high-quality results regardless of fields such as reports, literature, and coding. For this reason, Chat GPT or GPT-3.5 is called Generative AI.
Korean Students’ Use of Chat GPT
The UOS Times conducted an interview to find out how Korean students use Chat GPT.
Q1. What do you use Chat GPT for?
Interviewee1. When I am bored, I ask it some questions such as who is better, Messi or Ronaldo.
Interviewee2. I use Chat GPT to come up with ideas regarding my business project. I also improved my understanding of social problems that I want to solve through business.
Interviewee3. I used it to plan my trip. I went on a trip to Tokyo during the vacation, and I was able to have a great trip using Chat GPT.
Q2. How often do you use Chat GPT?
Interviewee1. When I first got to know Chat GPT, I used it every day because of its amazing abilities. Now, I usually use it 4-5 days a week.
Interviewee2. I use it intensively when I want to get new ideas or need to organize something like the table of contents of the reports. I think I use Chat GPT about two days every week.
Interviewee3. I use it every other day.
Advantages Chat GPT Brings
The overwhelming advantages of Chat GPT has led to a substantial increase in users. Chat GPT has brought a huge storm to the entire world and is expected to have an enormous effect on various fields of industries. There are people presenting pragmatic theory to this issue, emphasizing the advantages of Chat GPT. It has surprising efficiency. By using Chat GPT on duty, the working process has shortened. In addition, the aftermath Chat GPT has brought to the educational world is drawing attention.
The positive notion of this situation is focusing on the method of education in the future. Oh Sae-wook, who works for Korea Press Foundation, insists that finding the correct answer to problems, the traditional means, is useless in the robot era. People who are able to make creative questions for Chat GPT will be needed in the future generation.
Concerns About Chat GPT
However, public opinion of reproaching Chat GPT is hotly debated. It is involved in various problems.
AI hallucinations are issues about deteriorated reliability of information that AI provides. The word “hallucination” is used because the case of AI experiencing hallucinations is similar to people seeing something that is not there. AI hallucination occurs when an AI system gives faulty answers. The system sometimes perceives something as truth that does not exist in the real world.
Due to the huge amounts of data that are difficult to label and classify, errors occur. The main characteristic of Chat GPT is concocting a story as a truth that is in fact not. The users will believe the information in its responses and perceive it as a fact; fake information and false answers will spread on the internet. This will contribute to the diffusion of fake news, currently one of the most serious problems. Thus, the result generated by Chat GPT cannot be something people believe and use as a foundation.
Many AI services have been criticized because of copyright issues. This problem has been on the rise since the release of AI Painting Generators; after AI drawing became famous, many artists started criticizing it. The principle of AI drawing is the base principle of AI, learning. AI Painting Generators learn the existing artworks and analyze the pattern of those drawings. They then manipulate the acknowledgment they receive and create a new painting.
Since the programmers use the existing artworks of human artists, a controversy questioning whether it is right to use other people’s work without permission has arisen. Chat GPT also has a similar problem. The answer Chat GPT offers is the information many people have created. However, Chat GPT does not specify the origin of such information and response as it creates answers. This point is also connected to the copyright problem.
A chronic issue of AI taking away humans’ occupations is also in dispute. It threatens the jobs people perform because AI does better. Furthermore, Chat GPT is much more fluent than any other AI. In the old days, people thought the jobs related to creating such as writing, drawing, and thinking were capacities only human beings possess. However, Chat GPT can write essays, plays, and poems like human beings. AI can now even perform what were considered exclusive properties; even creators such as painters and writers can be surpassed by robots.
The release of Chat GPT has sent shockwaves throughout Western education. There are many cases of students who used Chat GPT for their assignments and achieved higher scores. As it is difficult to detect whether students use AI, teachers are agonizing about this issue.
Many schools are banning the use of Chat GPT for assignments. Furthermore, education workers are worrying about the decline in learning ability among teens. If they use Chat GPT, students do not have to agonize over how to write an essay or report. They also lose the opportunity to find acknowledgment about some topics themselves and learn deeply. In particular, the decline of literacy among teens is in the news. They do not have to find the answers themselves and have little need to read paper-based books. This is connected to the reduction and destruction of literacy.
Chat GPT has two sides. People who object to Chat GPT emphasize how AI will change the whole world. They argue that intelligent robots will transform human society into a world mainly with AI. Particularly, education experts are adopting conservative positions. Many people are concerned about the effect on teens who will live in the future filled with useful machines.
Some experts warn that AI like Chat GPT will make students incompetent. People who emphasize fluent AI insist that digital education is more essential. They think that objecting to useful AI is stupid as human beings cannot avoid intelligent robots. Since AI is a tool, people must use it to its full advantage. They insist that a new and developed digital literacy education is necessary, so investing in a new education system is what our society needs right now. In Sejong, the city hall is preparing to educate its employees on Chat GPT. To progress things efficiently, the person in charge of Sejong announced that it seems that Chat GPT will be used more actively in various fields.
There is no answer on how human and AI can live together. Since the present generation is in the transition period of using AI, people are confused. Thus, many controversies regarding this issue are ongoing.
Bae Kyeong-min
mymnbb0@uos.ac.kr
Ju Da-in
aaou2@uos.ac.kr