February Edition: Let's Talk About the Chatbot

Monthly Edition

Two months after OpenAI released ChatGPT into the world, here’s one thing we can probably all agree on: it’s been a lot.

How have we at TDS fared since the chatbot’s arrival? Why, thanks for asking! Imagine a roller coaster ride, set within a hall of mirrors, and lit by strobe lights: that’ll give you a rough idea of the experience from an editor’s perspective.

We’ve never seen a single topic grab the collective attention of our community with as much intensity, and it’s been exciting to see readers and authors energized by the tool’s potential. It’s been less exciting to wade through dozens of hype-fueled takes (which we didn’t publish), and downright frustrating to see our review queues clogged by AI-generated articles (to the best of our knowledge we didn’t publish those, either).

Just like our friends at Medium, who recently reflected on their policies around ChatGPT and similar tools, we’d also taken the time to discuss the chatbot’s effect on TDS as a publication. As a result, we updated our guidelines, and made it explicit that we only accept posts written entirely by humans.

Throughout this period, fortunately, our authors continued to draw on their expertise to share smart, measured, and timely posts about this emerging technology. To celebrate their excellent writing and to help readers approach ChatGPT with a more well-rounded and better-informed outlook, we selected some of the strongest contributions on the topic. (If you stumbled on other articles you enjoyed, feel free to share a link in the comments.)

Thank you, as always, for spending time with the work we publish. If you’d like to support it in more direct ways (and gain access to our entire archive along the way), please consider becoming Medium members.

TDS Editors

TDS Editors Highlights

How ChatGPT Works: The Model Behind The Bot (January 2023, 8 minutes) If you need a clear and accessible introduction to the methodology and technical infrastructure that power ChatGPT, Molly Ruby‘s explainer is an essential read.
The Carbon Footprint of ChatGPT (December 2022, 7 minutes) Within days of ChatGPT’s release, Kasper Groes Albin Ludvigsen attempted to answer a crucial question about the model’s environmental impact.
Not All Rainbows and Sunshine: The Darker Side of ChatGPT (January 2023, 9 minutes) Alongside the fun, creative aspects of large language models, Mary Reagan PhD argues that we should pay at least as much attention to potential risks and ethical issues.
Microsoft vs Google: Will Language Models Overtake Search Engines? (January 2023, 12 minutes) How will ChatGPT change our online habits and workflows? Looking into the (likely near) future, Alberto Romero reflects on the brewing competition between LLMs and traditional web search.
Can ChatGPT Write Better SQL than a Data Analyst? (January 2023, 6 minutes) Marie Truong‘s article (our most-read in January!) tackles a question that’s clearly on many data professionals’ minds: will the machines finally render us obsolete?