ChatGPT

Vahe H. Apelian

Instead of commenting on my Facebook page, I opted to blog about it simply because I wanted to pinpoint the day that I became aware of the term ChatGPT.

 Recently I posted Japan’s Armenia ambassador singing in Armenian. Varoujan Bedros, who is a mathematician, commented “ChatGPT”. I did not understand what he meant to say. I was not familiar with the term. It was the first time that I came across the term. Therefore, I acknowledged his comment with a question mark “?”. My cousin Jack Chelebian, who is a psychiatrist, came to my rescue. 

I quote from the Vol 22, No. 4, 2023, editorial of “Current Psychiatry”, Jack forwarded a copy to me. The editorial is titled: “A ‘guest editorial’ ... generated by ChatGPT?” by Henry Nasrallah, MD who Jack claims is a graduate of the American University of Beirut and is an internationally acclaimed psychiatrist and is the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine.

Dr. Henry Nasrallah commented that “For better or for worse, the era of AI generated articles is upon us”, and further notes that “The artificial intelligence (AI) program ChatGPT (generative pre-trained transformer) was introduced to the public by Open AI on November 30, 2022. It has been described as a game- changer for society, culture, literature, arts, and science, with a potential impact that rivals that of the internet and social media.”

The Editor-in-Chief of the “Current Psychiatry”, furthermore claimed that “Some researchers used ChatGPT to generate abstracts based on the titles of articles published in 5 high-impact journals. These abstracts were so “real” that they escaped detection by expert peer reviewers in 32% of cases. In addition, several medical/science articles were published that included ChatGPT as a bylined author.” Dr. Nasrallah then dwelt upon criteria for authorship in “Current Psychiatry.”

Dr. Henry Nasrallah has affixed a copy of his signature under his editorial to assure that that the editorial is not AI ChatGPT generated.

 But is it not? We have long accepted that a picture is not worth a thousand words any more. In fact, it may even be worthless for it could have been altered. But what about his signature. Can’t it have been AI generated also? Is not the editorial in fact a bona fide ChatGPT generated to make his point?

 It would not surprise me that a blog by ChatGPT could have made a much more compelling case that I could convey in this blog, that a really, really, really a new "brave world" is upon us. But, rest assured that this blog is not generated by AI.

 But, who is  assuring you? You may rightly wonder.