ChatGPT: With Stories, Songs, and Code, Rewriting the Rules of AI

Writer’s block may be a thing of the past, as may the equivalent for writing code. Stuck? From a simple prompt, ChatGPT, the latest AI bot from OpenAI, the people who brought us the Dall-E image generator, will write an essay, or a JavaScript routine, or any number of other creative works that can be expressed in text.

A friend asked it to create a children’s story based on the Art of War. My boss talked it into writing lyrics to a song in the style of Taylor Swift about her recent misadventures with Ticketmaster. I had it write a programming function for calculating the dates of the Jewish holidays.

A social media sensation thanks to so many people sharing something cool that the bot created on their behalf, ChatGPT is creating mainstream attention for OpenAI, a research lab that prior to this year was best known by computing industry insiders.

Key takeaways

• On December 3, just a few days after the November 30 announcement of a free open beta of ChatGPT, openai.com attracted nearly 2.5 million web visits. Traffic to the website had been building since the release of Dall-E 2 in June, but the previous daily peak for the year was just under 1 million visits. (Update: traffic continued to rise after we published our initial report to nearly 6.7 million visits on Dec. 6).
• The chat.openai.com subdomain for the tool drew more than 5 million visits on Dec. 6 and traffic seems likely to to continue rising.
• Search for information about the tool also exploded, with most searchers clicking straight through to openai.com.

A new high for OpenAI

Here is how traffic has grown, overall, for the openai.com website.

Most of that traffic flowed to ChatGPT at chat.openai.com where people were busy experimenting with what they could get the tool to do.

Meanwhile, searches on ChatGPT and related terms also surged, with most search traffic flowing straight to openai.com.

What’s so exciting?

OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research lab that includes a for-profit deep learning company, which in turn is owned by a nonprofit corporation focused on finding positive applications of AI technologies.

ChatGPT is built on OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) model for teaching computers to understand (or appear to understand) human language and produce meaningful responses to questions or prompts. Dall-E uses the same technology as the starting point for generating synthetic images, whereas ChatGPT responds with text. The two can be used together.

Some of the enthusiasm for ChatGPT comes from programmers and other technologists who can use the tool as an alternative to searching StackOverflow for the solution to a problem. Knowing a lot about programming code, ChatGPT can provide a detailed answer with code samples.

ChatGPT can also advise you on what technology to use …

… and recognize follow-up questions as part of the same conversation.

OpenAI cautions that even when the bot sounds like it knows what it’s talking about, the answers it provides may not always be right. On the other hand, we like who it lists first here, even if the information is slightly out of date.

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Methodology

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Image: Dall-E’s rendition of “a stained glass window depicting a robot”

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".