On Feb. 16, 2023, many of Vanderbilt University students felt sick and disgusted when they received an email from their Associate Dean of the EDI office.
Why?
What Turned a Caring Letter into a Careless Word Jumble?
The culprit was a short note at the bottom of the email that turned what seemed like a deeply compassionate letter into empty sentences: “Paraphrase from OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI language model, personal communication, February 15, 2023.”
Screenshot of the email (source)
Yes, the task of crafting the email had been handed over to ChatGPT.
Photo by Rolf van Root on Unsplash
For those who need a refresher, ChatGPT has become synonymous with AI and large language models nowadays.
It was trained on a vast amount of human texts online, and is adept at predicting the next word in a sequence, making it exceptionally skilled in human language processing tasks.