ChatGPT Can Now Access Current Data

The company that created ChatGPT, OpenAI, with funding from Microsoft, has verified that the chatbot can now browse the internet to give customers up-to-date information.

The system that runs on artificial intelligence was developed on data that was only available until September 2021.

With this change, a select group of premium customers will be able to access news and pose inquiries about current events to the chatbot.

OpenAI stated that all users would soon have access to the feature.

OpenAI also disclosed earlier this week that the chatbot will soon be able to speak with users over the phone.

Large volumes of data are used by ChatGPT and other comparable systems to generate believable, human-like answers to user inquiries.

It is anticipated that they will significantly alter how individuals do internet searches for information.

However, up until now, the “knowledge” of the widely used chatbot has remained static. The internet’s contents as of September 2021 were the source for its database. It was unable to conduct real-time web browsing.

For instance, if you ask the free version whether Donald Trump is still alive or when the last earthquake occurred in Turkey, it will respond, “I’m sorry, but I cannot provide real-time information.”

Some potential users have been turned off by ChatGPT’s failure to account for recent events.

“If this functionality or capability weren’t there, you would need to go to Google or to Twitter or to your preferred news outlet. Now, you can treat this as a source of the latest news, gossip and current events,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College London.

“So the main implication is that it’s going to absorb a lot of the incoming questions and inquiries that were going to search engines or going to news outlets,” he said.

However, Mr. Chamorro-Premuzic noted that there might be drawbacks to using the platform for searches.

“I think that’s a good thing in terms of getting quick responses to your pressing, burning questions,” he said, but warned that without sourcing, information provided through ChatGPT could be misleading.

“If it’s not stating in a reliable way what the sources are, and it’s simply doing a mix and a mish mash of what exists out there… then the concerns are around accuracy and people just assume the information they get there is reliable when it’s not.”

Regulators in the US have already begun to investigate OpenAI due to the possibility that ChatGPT will produce inaccurate data.

The Microsoft-backed company received a letter earlier this year from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) demanding information on how it handles hazards to people’s reputations.

The CEO of OpenAI responded by saying that the business would cooperate with the FTC.

For one thing, ChatGPT did not conduct an internet search until recently due to a variety of factors, including computational costs. It’s commonly stated that OpenAI loses a few pennies on each and every query.

More importantly, though, was that the scant data offered a useful safety net.

In response to a query, ChatGPT was unable to begin repeating damaging or unlawful content that it had happened to locate recently uploaded to the internet.

It didn’t have access to false material that bad actors had planted about politics or healthcare choices, so it couldn’t spew it.

The chatbot itself gave three responses when asked why it had taken so long to enable users to search for the most recent information.

It stated that creating language models required a lot of time and resources, that incorporating data from real-time sources could introduce errors, and that accessing real-time data, especially copyrighted content without authorization, had some ethical and privacy problems.

The new functions of ChatGPT aptly illustrate the massive predicament that the AI industry is facing. The guardrails need to be removed, or at least loosened, for the technology to be genuinely helpful, yet doing so increases the risk of misuse and increases the possibility for danger.

Credits: BBC

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