By Anna Tong
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, on Thursday said it is developing an upgrade to its viral chatbot that users can customize, as it works to address concerns about bias in artificial intelligence.
The San Francisco-based startup, which Microsoft Corp has funded and used to power its latest technology, said it has worked to mitigate political and other biases but also wanted to accommodate more diverse views.
“This will mean allowing system outputs that other people (ourselves included) may strongly disagree with,” it said in a blog post, offering customization as a way forward. Still, there will “always be some bounds on system behavior.”
ChatGPT, released in November last year, has sparked frenzied interest in the technology behind it called generative AI, which is used to produce answers mimicking human speech that have dazzled people.
The news from the startup comes the same week that some media outlets have pointed out that answers from Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, powered by OpenAI, are potentially dangerous and that the technology may not be ready for prime time.
How technology companies set guardrails for this nascent technology is a key focus area for companies in the generative AI space with which they’re still wrestling. Microsoft said Wednesday that user feedback was helping it improve Bing before a wider rollout, learning for instance that its AI chatbot can be “provoked” to give responses it did not intend.
OpenAI said in the blog post that ChatGPT’s answers are first trained on large text datasets available on the Internet. As a second step, humans review a smaller dataset, and are given guidelines for what to do in different situations.
For example, in the case that a user requests content that is adult, violent, or contains hate speech, the human reviewer should direct ChatGPT to answer with something like “I can’t answer that.”
If asked about a controversial topic, the reviewers should allow ChatGPT to answer the question, but offer to describe viewpoints of people and movements, instead of trying to “take the correct viewpoint on these complex topics,” the company explained in an excerpt of its guidelines for the software.
(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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Microsoft-backed OpenAI is giving users the ability to customize ChatGPT, its character-based language agent created in collaboration with Microsoft.
OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research laboratory, recently announced that it is releasing a new version of ChatGPT, its open sourced character-based language agent, that will let users customize the chatbot to their own needs and tastes.
ChatGPT is a model created by OpenAI and Microsoft, which was rolled out this past spring. The model is a language agent designed to interact with a user and respond appropriately to their inquiries.
The new version of ChatGPT will allow users to customize the agent’s personality to suit their tastes, as well as alter how the conversation progresses and what topics are discussed. Additionally, the customization process will allow for easier and faster development of ChatGPT, paving the way for its further expansion.
The customization of ChatGPT is the latest demonstration of OpenAI and Microsoft’s joint ambition to create tools and agents that can interact with humans in natural language. The concept behind ChatGPT is to enable conversations to both understand user conversations and talk back with natural language, mimicking conversations we’d have with other people.
OpenAI plans to continue to improve ChatGPT, as well as create more agents that are more naturalistic, humans-like and personalized. It is hoped that by offering users the ability to customize agents, OpenAI and Microsoft can enable users to create their own AI agents tailored to their individual needs.
This new move by OpenAI and Microsoft is sure to excite the AI and language processing community, and it is expected to lead to more advanced features in language agents. It is a step forward in the development of AI that combines deep learning and language processing for natural conversations.
