Is ChatGPT the new Clippy?
Shortly after Microsoft confirmed plans this week to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind the viral new AI chatbot tool ChatGPT, some people began joking on social media that the technology would help supercharge the much-hated, wide-eyed, paperclip-shaped virtual assistant.
While Clippy may mostly be a thing of the past, the company’s move to double down on AI tools offers the promise of doing what Clippy never quite achieved: transforming how we work.
“There is a kernel of truth to the Clippy comparison,” David Lobina, an artificial intelligence analyst at ABI Research. “Clippy was not based on AI – or machine learning – but ChatGPT is a rather sophisticated auto-completion tool, and in that sense it is a much better version of Clippy.”
Since it was made available in late November, ChatGPT has been used to generate original essays, stories and song lyrics in response to user prompts. It has drafted research paper abstracts that fooled some scientists. Some CEOs have even used it to write emails or do accounting work.
For Microsoft, integrating the chatbot tool could make its core software products more powerful. Some potential use cases include writing lines of text for a PowerPoint presentation, drafting an essay in Word or doing automatic data entry in Excel spreadsheets. For Microsoft’s search engine Bing, ChatGPT could provide more personalized search results and better summarize web pages. read more