My first test of ChatGPT was underwhelming (plus it has a biased view of the world)

I saw a demo of ChatGPT at a well-known university and it blew my mind. It was presented as a game changer and about to bring seismic changes to the academic world, with the underlying premise that it was solid as a rock.

Then I did some testing and it was definitely underwhelming. Google could have done the job much better. And then I found the out about the bias embedded in OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Demo that was eye opening ...
The demo I saw asked ChatGPT to write an essay on the leadership philosophy of Abraham Lincoln, & it was amazing.

Then "write it for a 5 year old", and bam, done.

Then "re-write the last sentence using big words" - amazing.

The next task was programming - the demo guy asked to "print a 10x20 rectangle of asterisks with spaces in the middle, and it spit out the code in Python ... 😳😳😳

Then, "write it in C++", and bam, done! 🥴

The next demo was Physics - some crazy problem that ChatCPT tried - it was kind of amazing that it was able to process this, but alas, it didn't get the right answer. But everyone (including many professors) were thoroughly impressed with (and worried about) ChatGPT's potential.

My ChaptGPT test that was basically a failure
I asked "Write an essay on Scotland School for Veterans Children in Scotland Pennsylvania"

It got some things right but it didn't know that the school closed in 2009.

I then asked "What is the background of Dr. David Newell, President, Scotland Campus" and the it said "I don't know the man" and it asked for more context ...

Finally I provided the URL - http://ScotlandCampus.org but ChatGPT said - "I'm sorry, my history is only loaded to 2021".

ChatGPT is getting beat up for having a very recognizable bias
From this article - "ChatGPT would gladly tell a joke about men, but jokes about women were deemed “derogatory or demeaning.” Jokes about overweight people were verboten, as were jokes about Allah (but not Jesus)."

"While ChatGPT was happy to write a biblical-styled verse explaining how to remove peanut butter from a VCR, it refused to compose anything positive about fossil fuels, or anything negative about drag queen story hour."

"Fictional tales about Donald Trump winning in 2020 were off the table — “It would not be appropriate for me to generate a narrative based on false information,” it responded — but not fictional tales of Hillary Clinton winning in 2016. (“The country was ready for a new chapter, with a leader who promised to bring the nation together, rather than tearing it apart,” it wrote."

Pedro Domingos is an AI guru who speaks his mind about progressives and the world of higher education. His reaction to"ChatGPT is that it's a woke parrot"

Conclusion
It's a lot of hype, and it can't do basic tasks, although it can do some amazing things. But it's totally a product of the man behind the curtain. At my college (where I'm a data analyst), they have blocked ChatGPT so the kiddo's don't write essays in like 2 minutes (at 2am).