ChatGPT and software development

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been all the rage lately with many pondering whether it will replace their livelihood. In short, robots are not going to take our jobs, but they may help develop new skills.

ChatGPT is the perfect combo of two AI concepts: chatbots and GPT3. Chatbots enable interaction through seemingly ‘intelligent’ conversation, while GPT3 produces output that appears to have ‘understood’ the question, the content and the context. When these two concepts are together it can produce the ‘uncanny valley’ effect, which prompts some pretty existential questions such as “is this a human or is this a computer” or “Is this a human-like computer”?

Will robots take my job? 

While that combination of tech is producing some noteworthy results – for example, it might be a helpful boost for your Tinder dating profile. On the flip side, it’s absolute rubbish at creating crosswords. Despite its gaps and shortcomings – ChatGPT is an amazing tool that can write poems, summarise documents, write software and help businesses with proposal writing. 

But it’s just not ready to take your job. 

When it comes to AI replacing actual-human-jobs, analysts predict that it will instead create new job opportunities. For example, the World Economic Forum predicts that although the shift to automation might mean the loss of some 75 million jobs, there’ll be 133 million new jobs created as a direct consequence of the added machine workforce.   

A great example of this is bank tellers and ATMs. When ATMs became popular, it was predicted bank tellers would lose their jobs on account of using automated tellers. However, the dawn of ATMs lowered the costs of opening new offices, so more offices were opened up. 

In turn, the new offices needed people to run them, so banks hired more people including bank tellers. However, by this point, their jobs had changed. They started focusing more on customer relations, as their routine tasks became automated. 

These assistant capabilities can be helpful in cutting down your time in software development rather than using ChatGPT to do your whole job. Like any new technology, it’s important to experiment and see how you could possibly use it as a tool to boost your productivity and possibly reserve some time to learn some new skills. 

*Please note, no AI was used to ideate, compile, or write this article – so it’s possible it took longer than it could have, or possibly less time than it might have. I’ll leave those existential questions to you.  

If you’d like to discuss how automation can improve efficiency and productivity in your organisation, Contact us for a quick chat with a real person.