Yahoo Finance tech reporter Allie Garfinkle highlights her latest "interview" with ChatGPT, asking the OpenAI program about how it will be implemented and what jobs it could potentially replace.

Video Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

SEANA SMITH: Well, sticking with ChatGPT, talking about experimenting with it, figuring out how it works, we are going to take a closer look at this, and then also about the information it spits out. We want to bring in tech reporter Allie Garfinkle. And Ali, you did just this. You had a conversation with ChatGPT. You interviewed ChatGPT. What was it like?

ALEXANDRA GARFINKLE: I did, Seana. As this has been going viral, people have been fascinated, obsessed, scared. I have been all three of those things, so I decided to ask it why. I should say others have done interviews with ChatGPT, but I had some questions of my own. It got pretty existential, but I wanted to just draw out three things that were really striking through the process.

The first-- number one is actually pretty simple. ChatGPT can't be on or off the record. This actually caught me a little bit by surprise. I was like, well, technically I'm defying my programming. Can I publish this if it's not on the record? The conclusion I came to is you can tell is yes, but it certainly presents other problems. Like, for instance, I think what I was expecting was that it would say, "I am always on the record. I am a machine learning model." Though as it turns out, it can be neither.

The second thing that was really striking was that to get good answers, you need to learn to talk to ChatGPT. We can't just talk to ChatGPT and say, hey, why are we fascinated by you? Or hey, what do you think of this? It's not going to give you personality. It's not going to tell you what it thinks unless you give it a little bit more color-- unless you tell it what personality to give you. Say the way a human would say-- bring you personality, whether you liked it or not. ChatGPT will actually respond to the personality you ask it for.

Since Seana, I know you love Reese Witherspoon, I asked it to impersonate Elle Woods seeing ChatGPT for the first time, and this is what it came back with. It features phrases like, "you got this." And it's like your part-- it's like your pink highlights bend, bend, and snap. It was really cute-- it was really cute. I was charmed by it.

But that said, despite our-- third thing that's important here is that despite our-- how impressed we are with some of the creative work ChatGPT does, I actually found its limitations to be substantial, particularly when it comes to these kind of creative tasks. For instance, it's not putting songwriters out of business anytime soon. I've had it do a couple of songs, but in this particular case, I asked it to provide the lyrics to a song by the Clash, and it couldn't complete the response. Actually, to date, is the only thing I have asked ChatGPT where it couldn't give me that response.

So though there's a lot about ChatGPT that is awesome, is interesting, it's certainly not the easiest interview I've ever done.

- And you had ChatGPT answer a question on my behalf. What was that? How did it go?

ALEXANDRA GARFINKLE: You were interested in asking about the jobs question, what kind of jobs ChatGPT is possibly coming for, and ChatGPT was a little defensive. What it was saying is, these are jobs I can help with, these are jobs I can assist with, but it said it was not coming for those jobs. However, I actually have run this response by an expert who disagrees. He says that there are actually implications for call center jobs, knowledge jobs, entry level jobs. What we're seeing here, Dave, is ChatGPT spouting the party line, as it were.

And I really like this question because it gets at the crux of why we're so fascinated. We're afraid of how it's going to reshuffle our world. We're fascinated, and we're afraid. We're afraid and we're fascinated, and I don't expect that to stop any time soon.

- We need a him or a her. Like, I don't believe "it." I believe it is coming for all of our jobs, Allie Garfinkle, but I'm old, so--

ALEXANDRA GARFINKLE: Yours, too?

- I worry for you young people. Not us old--

ALEXANDRA GARFINKLE: [LAUGHS]

- Ali, thanks so much.