Poetry To Exams: ChatGPT Can Compete With Humans In These 5 Areas

By slow degrees, the oceans and the land
Do feel the grip of this ungentle hand,
Which melteth ice and causeth seas to rise,
And storm and drought to plague our mortal lives.

These lines are from a poem that has been written by ChatGPT, a new, very intelligent chatbot created by the researchers at OpenAI that has become the most talked about software in the world, spawning attention from global entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, students, writers, doctors and even high courts.

ChatGPT is a text generator tool – accessible to all – that falls under the umbrella of generative AI, meaning an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that generates original text, images and sound by responding to the conversational text prompts it was given. 

The technology it was launched with was called GPT-3.5. In March, OpenAI rolled out GPT-4, an upgraded version of the same tech, that it claimed “exhibits human-level performance”. ChatGPT’s new model can analyse images and more extensive texts of up to 25,000 words, create websites from hand-drawn sketches and even recreate games – all in a matter of seconds. 

What has taken the world by storm is the OpenAI chatbot’s efficiency at predicting the exact words for the answer sought after, based on what it has learned from ingesting huge troves of written works. The viral sensation has opened up a plethora of opportunities for artificial intelligence but experts fear it could replace millions of jobs.

Here are five things ChatGPT can do faster, if not always better, than humans:

1. Writing school and university-level essays

One of the most criticised but also sought-after aspects of ChatGPT is its ability to ace essay writing. ChatGPT has had a notorious record of finishing homework for students. Schools and universities have now warned students that they will be punished if they use the AI tool to complete their essays.

According to a report by The Independent, a college graduate wanted to test ChatGPT to see if it could write a university essay – and it wrote one in just 20 minutes. The student showed the essay to his professors and asked them to evaluate it. They gave it a score of 53, or 2.2, which is well above passing marks.

The technology has been banned by several New York schools as students were found misusing it, while schools in other parts of the world are also contemplating restricting the use of ChatGPT. 

2.  Decision-making at a court ruling

In one of the latest and most significant achievements of ChatGPT, the Punjab and Haryana high court used the AI bot to make a decision in a criminal case. Justice Anoop Chitkara, heading the bench, was hearing a bail petition of an accused arrested on charges of rioting and murder. The bench sought a response from ChatGPT on bail when the assault was "laced with cruelty".

The bench, however, made it clear that any reference to ChatGPT and any observation made is neither an expression of opinion on the merits of the case nor shall the trial court advert to these comments.

3. Writing poems

A Twitter user named Dan Miller recently revealed what happened when he tasked ChatGPT to write a poem. Miller had prompted the chatbot to write a poem on climate change in Shakespearean style and the result, he shared, was “quite extraordinary”. 

This is the poem ChatGPT came up with:

Prithee, attend, thou gentle souls and wise,
To hear a tale of warming in our skies,
A change that doth the very earth beset,
And causeth all in sundry ways to fret.

In days of yore, when men didst burn with greed,
The blackened stone and ebon oils did feed
Their wanton lust for progress, wealth, and might,
Unwittingly they set a course for blight.

By burning these, they spewed into the air
A noxious gas, invisible yet fair,
This gas, which men doth call carbon dioxide,
A potent brew that nature doth deride.

Forsooth, this gas, with others of its kin,
Doth form a veil 'round all the world so thin,
That traps the sun's warm rays within its fold,
And causeth Mother Earth to sweat untold.

By slow degrees, the oceans and the land
Do feel the grip of this ungentle hand,
Which melteth ice and causeth seas to rise,
And storm and drought to plague our mortal lives.

Now, mark me well, dear friends, as I relate
The consequence of mankind's folly great:
The time is nigh when all that dwell on earth,
Must reckon with the cost of progress' birth.

To halt this change, we must our ways amend,
Turn from the path which leads us to our end,
Embrace the power of sun and wind and wave,
And strive, dear friends, our noble world to save.

Replying to a Twitter user’s comment asking how long the ChatGPT took to write the poem, Dan Miller said, “A few seconds”. 

4. Coding and developing games

ChatGPT has already become a rage in the programming world. According to a BBC report, a design lead at a business finance company called Brex had told the chatbot that he wanted to build a “Pong-like game”, referring to Atari's table tennis game of the 1970s, and asked it what the best language to use would be. While ChatGPT recommended him a programming language, as was expected, it also generated the code for a simple version of the game.

For a human, developing the code would easily take half an hour, the report said, but OpenAI’s chatbot did it in 40 seconds.

5. Clearing entrance exams

ChatGPT is constantly being tested by users to see how if it can clear university-level exams. The OpenAI chatbot has passed an MBA exam at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, with reportedly a B or B minus; the bot has cleared four law school courses at the University of Minnesota and also the US medical licensing exam, among others. The bot has also cleared the Google Coding Interview for Level 3 engineers.

However, ChatGPT has so far failed the Indian Civil Services Examination, conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), which is considered one of the toughest tests in the world.