ChatGPT... whatisit?

Craig Brigg Takes A Closer Look At A New Technology Likely To Change The World

understand and respond to questions and commands in a human-like manner. The chatbot was designed to be a platform for businesses to use to automate customer service, providing instant responses to user queries. It can be used to answer common questions, respond to customer complaints, and even provide personalised recommendations to customers. ChatGPT is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, which has been trained on over 45TB of data from websites, books, and other sources. This data has been used to create a deep learning neural network that can understand and respond to natural language queries. In addition to its conversational capabilities, ChatGPT also offers a number of tools to help businesses automate customer service. It can be used to create FAQs, provide personalised recommendations, and even respond to customer complaints. Overall, ChatGPT is an exciting new AI-based chatbot that can help businesses automate customer service and provide better customer experiences. So in short, you can provide the chatbot with a question or request, which will prompt it to generate a reply or response for you.

Although this was a rather technical and detailed response from ChatGPT, the beauty of the chatbot is that one can request the simplification of the output to provide an article for easier, simplified reading merely by asking for it. Does this ultimately mean that our children will have the opportunity to have projects and articles researched and written for them? Will it lead to a dumbing down of the human race and lazy children?

The mind boggles at the impact of such AI on the future of our universe. Kevin Roose of The New York Times labelled it “the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public”, and yet it may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity really is. That’s a frightening concept, and there is considerable negativity around ChatGPT. Some suggest it can “hallucinate” and provide incorrect information for many of its answers. When it has been tested it often produced factually ambiguous responses. It’s not perfect, but it’s still early in its development and already amassed over

100-million users in January 2023 alone.

There are some exciting benefits to this new age technology, and one in particular that applies to education is that it allows students and journalists to quickly research articles, projects or reports as baseline information – although we still require critical and higher order thinking to finalise those articles, projects or research papers as intellectual humans. It’s also a wonderful tool for planning, because it allows a quick and easy way to explore your subject material.

Currently ChatGPT is a free service in South Africa, but paying options will exist in the near future for more advanced features. This technology is likely to change the world in which we live. *

Ionce heard psychologist Lisa Damour describe the role of a parent of tweens as “a swimming pool wall”. The function of a swimming pool wall is to put boundaries around the water, and provide a place for swimmers to hold on when they are tired or afraid and need a safe place to catch their breath.

Picture your tween in a pool; the middle of the pool is her life independent of you, and you are the swimming pool walls. When she was little, she hung on to you because she didn’t know how to swim, and you were her constant safe place. But as she has matured, she has grown in confidence and competence, needing more space and freedom to live independent of you. But during this very complex time of rapid physical, social, emotional, and cognitive changes, tweens need our presence more than ever.

How can we provide the safe place for them to come back to while at the same time letting go just enough for them to grow strong, able and confident in the waters of life?

Here are a few things that your tween really needs to know:

• You like them (not just love them). Their minds are full of self-doubt, questions, and insecurities. Knowing you think they are competent, cool, and fun will give them confidence to venture into the water.

• There is nothing you won’t talk about, no question you won’t answer. They are