Talking to ChatGPT for the first time is a surreal experience
That chat, which you can listen to and read a transcript of below, shouldn't be treated as an interview with an official OpenAI spokesperson or anything. Still, it serves as a fun way to offer an initial test of ChatGPT's live conversational chops.
Even in this short introductory "chat," we were impressed by the natural, dare we say, human cadence and delivery of ChatGPT's "savvy and relaxed" Sol voice (which reminds us a bit of '90s Janeane Garofalo). Between ChatGPT's ability to give quick responses—offered in milliseconds rather than seconds—and convincing intonation, it's incredibly easy to fool yourself into thinking you're speaking to a conscious being rather than what is, as ChatGPT says here, "still just a computer program processing information, without real emotions or consciousness."
Regardless of how self-aware that information-processing engine is or is not, it's easy to envision people forming an intense parasocial relationship with the smooth voices at the other end of OpenAI's servers. And this seems set to open up a whole new era in our collective relationship with AI, even if the large language model generates the exact same words it did in the more text-based era of previous ChatGPT models.
