RISE OF THE MACHINES

The runaway success of ChatGPT opens a new frontier in technology. Will artificial intelligence upend your life?

- K. SUNIL THOMAS

Vivek Tripathi wanted to write a haiku to surprise his wife on their wedding anniversary. But he did not have the time or inclination to sit down and ruminate, and let his creative juices do the deed. So the bureaucrat, who works on high-speed rail, turned to his new personal assistant.

No, it was not a secretary or some prolific new recruit. Tripathi just instructed ChatGPT, the new chatbot on the internet, to make a haiku for him.

"It came out pretty accurately!" he said, mighty impressed.

Of course, making Japanese poems of seventeen syllables is not the only thing that Tripathi does with this artificial intelligence (AI) tool that has taken the world by storm in the past few weeks. He uses it to schedule his meetings and draft routine emails to employees that otherwise would have taken up a good chunk of his time.

"I use ChatGPT, as well as many other Al tools, to increase my personal productivity," said Tripathi. This ranges from asking Dall.E, a web application that can give visual answers the way ChatGPT comes up with text, to tailor a meme to send to his son on his birthday to asking ChatGPT to prepare an algorithm for a dynamic pricing mechanism for trains when booking goes beyond a certain percentage. "I've become a keen user of these technologies, now that I have seen what it can do," he said. "Al is going to make a world of difference." That world, in fact, is already here.

Talk of generative AI or machine learning (ML), where computer networks use data from billions of sources to come up with predictive human-like options, has been doing the rounds in the past few years. But then, they were thought of as geeky gobbledygook rather than anything that really concerned common people.

Not anymore.

AVATAR

Artificial intelligence burst into Indians' consciousness this winter when a startup halfway across the globe launched ChatGPT three months ago.