Few technologies in the past few decades have created as much excitement as ChatGPT. The idea of an ethereal electronic brain that can synthesise the world’s online knowledge and information to create something new and perfectly adapted to your purpose seems like the stuff of magical science fiction.
This image inspires unrealistic aspirations and expectations. A friend of mine posted on social media that he was looking forward to trying ChatGPT on a multi-million-pound commercial property valuation, prompting a lengthy thread about the pros and cons of generative AI. To be fair, his experiments produced plausible documents. But every time he ran the request it generated a different plausible document. Normally a commercial property offer is the settled conclusion of lots of time spent trudging round a physical location and kicking at brickwork. Can an automatically generated document, built on inferences and linguistic probabilities, replace that? Even if he gets away with it in the short term, it’s a
