Member-only story
Explaining AI Magic … for humans
Demystifying ChatGPT in Plain English
One of the games you’ve probably played when you were young is the Word Chain game. It’s a simple but fun game where players have to create a chain of words linked by some rules. There are different variations of this game, but in the version, I’m talking about, the first player will start with a simple phrase like “Yesterday, I went to the”, and the second play must repeat that phrase and continue it by adding a word. So in this context, the next word might be “beach”, “shopping mall”, or some other place. The game ends when a player cannot think of a word that fits the rule.
Now let’s imagine for a second that the second player is an AI. So I give it a phrase, and he writes the next word. But rather than taking turns, the AI keeps taking all the turns until it cannot think of a word that fits the rule. So if I type “Yesterday, I went to the”, the AI will reply: “Yesterday, I went to the beach, had an ice cream but felt chilly, so I went home.”
Well done, you’ve just played word chains with an AI!
Doesn’t this game remind you of something? It probably does because this is precisely how chatGPT and other similar AI systems work. The approach is straightforward, and you’ve understood it in a few lines. That is why many top AI scientists are cautious…
