What Is ChatGPT, and How Can I Use It?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot that’s designed to simulate natural human conversation. It's a project of OpenAI, which is the AI research company that’s also responsible for the DALL-E AI art generator.

What Is It?

ChatGPT is an AI language model that answers questions and generates text based on prompts. It’s built on a generative machine learning model, which means that it was provided with a large dataset of information and trained to create new text based on the original information.

It’s also a natural language AI, which means you can interact with it in essentially the same way you would talk to a person, and it responds in the same manner. It runs on OpenAI’s servers, and you can access it through a web browser.

It can engage in conversations, answer questions, summarize and condense text, translate between multiple different languages, and even analyze text for emotional subtexts. Its knowledge base is considerable, and it can answer questions on a variety of subjects, and even write and debug computer code.

Who Built This?

ChatGPT was built by OpenAI, which is a research company dedicated to developing and experimenting with artificial intelligence systems. In addition to ChatGPS, OpenAI also has a number of other AI projects in the works.

The most well-known of their other projects is DALL-E, which is an AI capable of generating artwork from text prompts. They’ve also built a speech recognition system called Whisper, an algorithm called Jukebox that can generate music, and even a team of video game bots that had some success beating human players in the five-on-five MOBA game Dota 2.

When Was ChatGPT Released?

OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, but it’s built on earlier generative pre-training (GPT) models that OpenAI has been working on since 2018. The version released in November 2022 was a prototype intended for training and feedback, which is why OpenAI made it available to the public for free.

There is also a paid version, ChatGPT Pro, that OpenAI released in February 2023. This premium version didn't replace the free version, which is still available. The Pro version provides access to new features, and it also gives paid users priority over server resources.

While free users are still able to use the service, they can receive an “at capacity” error message whenever too many people are trying to use ChatGPT. Subscribers get to bypass that message, as their requests are prioritized.

How Does It Impact Me?

ChatGPT probably won’t have any direct impact on your daily life right away, but artificial intelligence systems like this will have wide-ranging consequences in the future. You can use it in a lot of different ways right now, though. You can ask it questions, have conversations, ask it to assist you in writing emails and other documents, and even find bugs in computer code.

One way that ChatGPT may already be impacting you is in the ways that other people are using it. For example, a co-worker or acquaintance may have enlisted ChatGPT to write an email that they then sent to you as if they had written it.

If you’re a teacher, you will also want to be on the lookout for ChatGPT-penned essays and other assignments.

ChatGPT is also useful as an assistive tool, rather than simply doing work for the user. For example, you can ask it to provide creative prompts or headlines to get started with a story, to simplify a complex topic to help you understand it, or even to write a prompt that you can use with an AI art generator.

Even if you don’t go looking to use ChatGPT yourself, it may end up integrated in other services that you use.

For example, Microsoft has integrated AI technology into its Bing search engine and has developed its own version called Copilot. This integration allows the search engine to answer questions in natural language and perform many of the other functions ChatGPT is known for, rather than simply returning web search results. 

How Can I Try It?

You can try out ChatGPT for yourself at ChatGPT's site, but server access is limited for free accounts. If too many people are trying to use it at once, you’ll see an error message and have the opportunity to provide your email address. If you enter your email address, OpenAI will notify you when server congestion is lower.

To get started with ChatGPT, you need to create an account or log in using your existing OpenAI account. You can use the same account for all of OpenAI’s services, so if you’ve used DALL-E in the past, you can just use that account. A basic account is free, but the premium ChatGPT Plus account, which lets you use new features early, costs $20 a month.

Once you’ve signed up and logged in, you can use ChatGPT by simply typing any question you'd like an answer for. You can format your question or prompt the same way you would as if you were talking to another person, and it will understand. It remembers your previous questions and its previous answers as well, so you can ask it to rephrase an answer or elaborate and it can do that.

What Can I Do With ChatGPT?

ChatGPT can do a lot of different things, and it will even give you a rundown of its various capabilities if you ask. If you’re excited to get started with ChatGPT, but you aren’t quite sure what to do with it, here are some of its most important capabilities:

• Conversations: ChatGPT is a type of chatbot, because it will engage in conversation as if there were another person on the other end of the connection. You can talk about a wide variety of topics, from current events to philosophy.
• Answering questions: If you ask a question, ChatGPT will answer it. You can ask about current events, history, science, and a variety of other topics, but the AI will typically refrain from making speculations, particularly about real people.
• Generating text: You can ask ChatGPT to generate text in a specific style or format, such as writing a poem, essay, or email. You can specify the subject, style, subject matter, and other factors, and it will fill in the rest.
• Translation: If you enter a section of text in quotation marks, you can ask ChatGPT to translate it to a different language.
• Simplification: ChatGPT will take a long, complicated passage and condense or simplify it for you.