What should you think about ChatGPT? Ask some humans

ChatGPT has been blowing minds for two whole months now, but it is making me, a journalist, uncomfortable.OpenAI, the bot’s developer, says [Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( ChatGPT has been blowing minds for two whole months now, but it is making me, a journalist, uncomfortable. OpenAI, the bot’s developer, [says]( it was trained to “answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.” The American Press Institute’s definition of “journalism” — “the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information” — sounds a bit too similar. If a [computer can create art]( and a [chatbot can write](, where can we go from here? Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg [BuzzFeed Inc. isn’t about to wait]( to figure it out. Last week the online media company announced that “AI inspired content” will become “part of our core business” this year, sending its stock price soaring as much as 200%. //link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/click/30392406.61627/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmxvb21iZXJnLmNvbS9vcGluaW9uL2FydGljbGVzLzIwMjMtMDEtMTgvY2hhdGdwdC1zb3VuZHMtZXhhY3RseS1saWtlLXVzLWhvdy1pcy10aGF0LWEtZ29vZC10aGluZz91dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fdGVybT0yMzAxMjkmdXRtX2NhbXBhaWduPXNoYXJldGhldmlldw/582c8673566a94262a8b49bdB2257784f“[Wall Street sure does love a fad](, and it looks as if artificial intelligence may be the next ‘it’ thing,” writes Robert Burgess. “AI now feels like the internet in 1996 — full of promise, just in ways we don’t know yet.” Bloomberg News’s Sam Potter and Katherine Greifeld ran with that promise and asked [ChatGPT to create a winning portfolio]( for the US stock market. “The result: A classic exercise in fence-sitting, with the tool explaining that the market is too unpredictable to design such a fund, while warning about the need to pick investments aligning with our goals and appetite for risk-taking.” Matt Levine says that while the result is disappointing, [ChatGPT might make a decent investment banker](. “I wouldn’t bet on it or anything; it’s interesting to speculate about, but it seems unlikely that a computer will get good at making investment decisions just by ingesting how humans have articulated investment decisions,” he writes. “But I bet a computer could get pretty good at articulating investment decisions from that training set.” As Parmy Olson notes, making money is still a human-driven enterprise (in the form of people making clicks). [Microsoft is planning to challenge Google’s dominant search]( function by upgrading Bing, its unloved search tool, with the technology behind ChatGPT. One very human drawback to the plan? “Microsoft will have to iron out the tendency for the language model behind ChatGPT to be confidently incorrect,” Parmy writes. “As it grapples with alternative facts, it is also racing against competition from other application makers.” Microsoft has already committed [$10 billion to OpenAI](, with plans to utilize its technology well beyond Bing. More than 70 years ago, [Alan Turing’s test]( framed the question everyone’s asking today. “By Turing’s standards, machines can now think,” Stephen Mihm writes. “But the only way they have been able to pull off this feat is to become less like machines with rigid rules and more like humans.” He continued: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But is it the machines we need to fear, or ourselves?” Eduardo Porter seemed to agree when he wrote about [AI’s risk to humanity itself](: “The self-assured march of newfangled technologies onto society demands a critical evaluation. Because the casualties of progress are piling up, calling into question why we’re deploying such technologies in the first place,” he writes. Will we regret the rise of AI? It’s a question we should all be asking ourselves — and other humans. New Podcast Alert Crash Course is a podcast about business, political and social disruption — and what we can learn from it. In the latest episode, host Tim O’Brien, Bloomberg Opinion’s senior executive editor, talks to columnist Beth Kowitt on the battle of the CEO Bobs at Disney. Listen on [Apple]( and [Spotify](. Notes: To contact the author of this newsletter, email bsample1@bloomberg.net. This is the Theme of the Week edition of Bloomberg Opinion Today, a digest of our top commentary published every Sunday. Follow us on [Instagram](, [TikTok](, [Twitter]( and [Facebook](. Like getting this newsletter? [Subscribe to Bloomberg.com]( for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and subscriber-only insights. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Bloomberg Opinion Today newsletter. 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