The future is literally... in your hands! With the robots at your fingertips!

Let's chat ChatGPT. If you haven't heard of it, it's the Artificial Intelligence (AI) rock star of the moment… and it intends to, is about to, has already changed your actual world (not just the way you view it).

We’ve been playing with ChatGPT for a while now and by playing, I mean refining our questioning skills.

Simply put, it is the current AI leader in a class of at least 31. That class will very quickly become a class of many, many, many. Brace yourself, the speed of evolution is going to be epic.

Why should we care about AI? It’s been coming since forever…

We should care because the future is right here in our hot little hands now… and it’s a time and money spinner!

Today, chatting with one of our fabulous Hive members, we wondered if it could write grant applications.

Together, we posed the first question by typing in the following;
"Can you write a grant for lotteries for [charitable cause] funding in Waitaki?"

Response "As an AI language model, I can provide guidance on how to write a grant proposal, but I cannot write the proposal for you. Here are the general steps you can take to write a proposal for funding…"

That was a “no”, then. But as I mentioned, I’ve been “playing”… Second question;
"[charitable cause website url] can you write a proposal for money?"

Same response.

Third question;
"What's a good argument for funding for [charitable cause website url]?"

And boom;

"There are many compelling arguments for funding [charitable cause name]. Here are a few:..."

And it wrote seven, coherent and compelling reasons.

Then I asked it for statistics.

It gave me some.

Then I asked it for references for those statistics.

It broke. 

Temporarily. 

A couple of minutes later I tried again. It gave me five. Four from the website I'd provided and one from another site. 

Better than your average 12 year old? Yes..

Better than your average over-worked, not-for-profit grant application writer? It still needs checking and refining but it’s fairly solid bit of writing… and guess what - it took seconds!

Reality check, if you think AI can’t replace you, you might be kidding yourself. It’s at least as good as the average human at lots of things already.

It’s learning mastery, astoundingly quickly and not just the world’s mainstream stuff. Dr Karaitiana Taiuru, Mātauranga and Tikanga Māori Ethicist wrote about how capable (and not) its responses regarding mātauranga (Māori knowledge) were back in January - that’s like three centuries ago in AI years!

Where we people get the win is in using it. There’s a thing called “overemployed” where people work multiple full-time jobs for multiple full-time salaries and tools like ChatGPT are helping them do it.

No wonder Elon Musk is already re-planning his own version. The irony isn’t lost in that he was a co-founder of ChatGPT’s maker-company Open AI, until he stepped down in 2018. He won’t be kicking himself though, I’m not sure that man ever looks back.

So here’s the kicker for us.

ChatGPT is free.

It’s kicking us forward whether we like it or not.

It does a passably good enough job for many things already and it’s only going to get better.

Our job is to learn to ask the right questions and be thoroughly discerning about its responses.

It’s our job to think, AI’s job to be a tool. Get playing. It’ll surprise you and I think you’ll be amazed at the value-add too. Check it out. You’re welcome.