ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. The chatbot has a language-based model that the developer fine-tunes for human interaction in a conversational manner. Although its primary use case is for customer service, the powerful tool is currently being utilized for a wide range of activities, such as writing essays, drafting business plans, generating code, and so on.
ChatGPT works by gathering publicly available data from the internet written by other people and leveraging that data alongside computing predictions to answer questions and queries inputted by the user. An end user will prompt the chatbot with a textual request, in which the chatbot will generate a reply and will continue to ‘learn’ more about different subjects and how to discuss them as time progresses.
Code writing and code review is one area that many believe ChatGPT could play a vital role in expediting the process and eliminating a large amount of work that was previously conducted by humans. ChatGPT can provide suggestions and comments on human-written code by using natural language processing techniques to understand the meaning and context of code. But there are several important factors to consider before employing ChatGPT or any other chatbot as your full-time computer code writer:
Keeping these factors in mind, IT leadership should not fear ChatGPT but rather embrace it as an opportunity to learn and innovate with AI. Organizations can do so by:
While the extremely rapid progression that AI chatbots have undergone over the past few months is enough to frighten many about their job security, we all must understand that these chatbots will likely serve as a tool to compliment many professions, at least in the near future. Will the day come that some jobs are entirely replaced by AI? Most likely, though it will not happen overnight. Back in 2020, the University of Melbourne wrote an insightful article on the history of jobs replaced by technology, and the new jobs that it created. The emergence of AI tools such as ChatGPT will mark the next chapter in humanity’s workforce evolution!