Chat GPT has gotten a lot of attention since its launch in November 2022. Its parent company, OpeAI, recently secured a $10 billion investment from Microsoft. Online media outlet BuzzFeed announced it plans to leverage the technology to create content. Arguments from both sides are storming in the education sector, and these are just a glimpse of all the different conversations.
Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, commonly called ChatGPT, is a chatbot launched by OpenAI. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. Although not always factually accurate, it can generate well articulate answers and responses across many different disciplines and fields in a short amount of time thus garnering a lot of attention.
The main feature is to mimic a human conversationalist. It has the ability to write and debug computer programs, compose music, compose poetry and song lyrics, write fairy tales and student essays and many more. It can also remember previous prompts given to it in the same conversation. The limitation, according to OpenAI, ChatGPTs parent company, is that it sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. It also has limited knowledge of events that occurred after 2021.
Drupal founder Dries Buytaert recently showcased on his blog how he asked ChatGPT to write a letter to his wife Vanessa and ask her to bake some cookies. He ended the blog with a photo of, guess what? Those cookies.
In the web development world, AI is nothing new. For example in Drupal, modules like Azure Cognitive Service API, Automatic Alternative Text, Acquia Lift Connector, Chatbot API and many more, utilize AI in some shape or form to achieve their goal. Whether it is for customer support or facial, speech and image recognition.
The extent to which ChatGPT and other AI applications can impact web development is still to be researched. But from what we currently see and how the web development community has experimented with ChatGPT in the last few months, it is a very capable system that can be a task with a lot of work that a junior developer can achieve with much less time needed. This is not to say that it can fully replace human developers at the moment because currently, it can’t perform tasks such as testing and debugging its own code. The code either works or not and therefore still needs supervision. But this free version right now is just a prototype and who knows what it could be capable of in the future.
What we can be sure of is that AI will definitely have a big influence on web development going forward. It can be leveraged to simplify complex development processes, perfect layout suggestions, reduce human errors, enhance customer experience and much more. The use cases will grow and slowly be useful in more and more ways. Whether you are in the healthcare industry, real estate, education, entertainment or logistics. This is definitely something to look into.