In a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, researchers explored whether ChatGPT, an advanced AI chatbot, could provide valuable social advice. The findings suggest that later versions of ChatGPT offer better personal advice than professional columnists.
ChatGPT has gained popularity since its release in November of last year, accumulating an estimated 100 million active monthly users. It is powered by one of the largest language models ever created, with the more advanced paid version (GPT-4) estimated to have 1.76 trillion parameters. The chatbot can provide advice on various topics, including law, medicine, history, and more. It has impressed users and AI experts alike with its versatility and conversational style.
However, providing personal advice requires empathy and sound judgment, qualities that ChatGPT was not explicitly trained for. An earlier version of the chatbot performed poorly in giving social advice as it failed to address users’ emotional needs adequately. The latest version, using GPT-4, allows users to request multiple responses to the same question, helping the model learn to produce more socially appropriate and empathetic responses.
In the study, researchers compared ChatGPT’s responses to those of professional advice columnists in addressing social dilemmas. Participants perceived ChatGPT’s advice as more balanced, complete, empathetic, helpful, and overall better than the advice from professionals. However, most participants still preferred their own social dilemmas to be addressed by a human rather than a computer.
The success of ChatGPT’s responses may be attributed to their length, as they were often longer than those provided by columnists. Even when ChatGPT’s answers were constrained to a similar length as the columnists’, participants still preferred its advice. However, participants still showed a bias in favor of humans, possibly due to the belief that machines are incapable of empathy.
The researchers emphasize that ChatGPT should not replace professional advisers or therapists, as it has given potentially dangerous advice in the past. However, appropriately designed chatbots could potentially augment therapy in the future, provided certain issues are addressed. Advice columnists may also benefit from learning from AI to improve their own practices.
