Culture | Johnson

ChatGPT is a marvel of multilingualism

It may make things up, but it does so fluently in more than 50 languages

THE HYPE that followed ChatGPT’s public launch last year was, even by the standards of tech innovations, extreme. OpenAI’s natural-language system creates recipes, writes computer code and parodies literary styles. Its latest iteration can even describe photographs. It has been hailed as a technological breakthrough on a par with the printing press. But it has not taken long for huge flaws to emerge, too. It sometimes “hallucinates” non-facts that it pronounces with perfect confidence, insisting on those falsehoods when queried. It also fails basic logic tests.

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This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Speaking in many tongues”

From the April 1st 2023 edition

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