ChatGPT: The magical use of ChatGPT

Google translation:

Chen Zhiting: The magical use of ChatGPT

https://www.zaobao.com.sg/lifestyle/columns/story20250118-5741748

2025-01-18

When ChatGPT swept the world in 2022, I was still applying for a doctorate. At that time, I heard that this software could modify sentences and writing fragments, and writing became something that did not require careful consideration. But I did not use it at that time, and now I use it to automatically generate footnotes for papers.

The emergence of artificial intelligence has brought a lot of convenience and changes to the physical and mental labor of the human world. More and more people around me use ChatGPT, and the Internet is full of advertisements placed by other artificial intelligence program companies. ChatGPT has already attracted many people without advertising. Professors have to indicate in the syllabus that artificial intelligence cannot be used to write homework.

 With a curious attitude, I asked it to summarize the contents of the very famous book on Southeast Asian history, "Imagined Communities: The Origin and Spread of Nationalism", and the answer I got was a fabricated answer. The most obvious use of artificial intelligence in writing articles is that the footnote page numbers it cites cannot withstand scrutiny. It often repeatedly cites the same page from different books, or cites a page that is beyond the page number range of this book. We guess that artificial intelligence may also have preferences, and it likes a certain number.

Later, it gradually penetrated into my life and became ubiquitous. For doctoral students in the history department, in addition to English, we must learn two languages ​​to take the doctoral qualification examination. During a casual chat in a cafe, a senior who studies German history said in surprise, "Do you know that you can chat with ChatGPT in German?" We asked, is it the typed one? He said no, it is the kind of verbal communication.

It's amazing. I haven't tried to chat with it in Indonesian yet. I just often use it to look up the roots of Indonesian words.  Artificial intelligence has brought more than just improvements to the way of learning unfamiliar languages. It has also eliminated the necessity of learning multiple languages ​​for liberal arts majors.

Another doctoral student has begun to use the programming language Python to replace the language requirement of traditional languages. He believes that in the context of artificial intelligence, it is not important to master multiple languages. As long as you throw e-books and journal articles to artificial intelligence, they can summarize the core ideas of the book in a few seconds.

What this student is doing now is to feed the handwritten archives of government officials in the 1930s to his written artificial intelligence program, train the program to recognize handwriting and words, and then it can easily read the content of historical materials. In this way, the time spent by liberal arts scholars in archives and libraries day and night copying materials is completely redundant. The experience of searching archives that historians are proud of is also useless.

But I recently discovered a magical use of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT has evolved to the point of being able to read people's hearts. As a human being, I am ashamed of its ability to empathize and perceive subtle emotional changes. Just send it a chat record, and it can provide multiple responses with high emotional intelligence for your reference.  When I encounter an agent I don't want to deal with, it can easily help me deal with the other party and generate a reply that will not offend people but can express a firm rejection. Sometimes it speaks better than me, and sometimes it is too human. (From the United States)