Chinese netizens explore ChatGPT

The ChatGPT website is displayed on a computer screen with the OpenAI logo on a smartphone screen in Shanghai on February 6 (VISUAL PEOPLE)

Just 30 seconds after receiving a slightly urgent and very optimistic request for help writing a love letter ahead of Valentine's Day, ChatGPT offered the following response:

"Writing a letter professing my love for you, it's like something out of a cheesy romantic movie. But the truth is, I really do love you. Despite the fact that I can't stand your constant singing in the shower, your weird obsession with pineapple on pizza, and the way you always leave the toothpaste cap off."

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed by San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, is capable of generating human-like responses to natural language inputs. A survey conducted by global computer security software company McAfee found that one in three men surveyed planned to use ChatGPT to write love letters this past Valentine's Day. The survey also found that more than two out of three respondents were unable to tell the difference between love letters created by the tool and those written by humans.

From love letters to academic essays and advertisements, users have already discovered a broad range of applications for the tool over the two months since it was launched and are still exploring new ways to harness its copywriting abilities.

Unlike traditional search engines, which work efficiently only when users are able to both formulate the correct search terms and to select the useful information from a sea of results, ChatGPT is able to understand users' questions and formulate answers based on many sources. It composes all relevant information it collects from across the Internet and compiles it into a logical and systematic answer. Additionally, these responses are sometimes witty.

The tool is capable of understanding questions and giving answers in standard Chinese and many of China's more than 1 billion Internet users have joined the craze as well. Hashtags related to the chatbot on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, had amassed 150 million views as of February 14, according to the platform's statistics. Netizens experimented with simple questions like "How much is two plus five? My wife says it's eight and she's always right." In response, instead of insisting the answer is seven, ChatGPT tells users, "If your wife says it's eight, then it must be eight."

"ChatGPT is a disruptive breakthrough for AI-generated content (AIGC), because language is heavily used in our daily lives and we are keenly aware of minor errors in expression by language models," Li Peng, an associate professor at Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research, told news website China Report ASEAN. "However, ChatGPT uses language in a way that has far exceeded our expectations. Few applications prior to it could leave such an impression on users in conversations. As it stands, the model does represent the highest level of AIGC application."

Chinese tech giants are also racing to build similar AI tools. Baidu, a leading AI company, is planning to roll out a ChatGPT-style bot, known as ERNIE Bot, in March. "ERNIE is in its final sprint before finally going online," Baidu told Global Times on February 7. E-commerce behemoth Alibaba confirmed to Global Times on February 8 that it, too, is testing a ChatGPT-style technology based on years of research since the formation of Damo Academy, the company's research institute, in 2017.

"There is still room for ChatGPT to improve. As the training data only goes up until 2021, the chatbot cannot handle the new knowledge and data that have emerged since," Li said. Additionally, while it is capable of generating seemingly fluent and credible texts, the currently available version does not attach sources for the information it provides, making it more difficult for users to verify the content. Users have found that while a beta version, currently in testing, does provide sources, it is unable to separate those that have been fabricated from those that are real."

"The training and maintenance cost of ChatGPT is huge. Therefore, reducing these costs, increasing revenue and improving commercialization need to be taken into consideration in the future," he concluded.