Summary
- ChatGPT should provide easier access, like Copilot, through desktop clients and apps, expanding its availability beyond the website.
- A tone-setter feature in ChatGPT would allow users to customize the conversational style based on their needs, just like Copilot offers.
- ChatGPT should implement a feature to source information and provide citations, enhancing trust and accountability for the accuracy of its responses.
ChatGPT is arguably the most well-known AI chatbot out there. When it was released on the web, it created a lot of opportunities for AI to develop and grow. ChatGPT showed us how artificial intelligence can research a topic, tell a story, or just converse in ways we've never seen before.
Microsoft has its own chatbot called Copilot, which is built on OpenAI's GPT and other large language models (LLM) to perform its tasks. You can find Copilot either on your Windows 10 or 11 PC, within Microsoft Edge, or through Bing. However, despite using ChatGPT as part of its framework, Microsoft has added some extra features to Copilot that enhance how you use it and make it better than ChatGPT in some respects. Here are just four Copilot features I'd like to see in ChatGPT one day.
4 Implementing ChatGPT officially outside of the website
Bring the AI tool to your fingertips
Love it or hate it, Microsoft has made it very easy to access Copilot, and you don't even need an excellent high-end laptop to do it. If you're on Windows 10 or 11, you can invoke Copilot using a taskbar icon. If you're not on Windows, you can access Copilot on the web instead. And if you open up Edge, just click the Copilot icon at the top right, and you have your very own AI-based browser assistant. There's even now an Android app for Copilot. You need to sign up for a Microsoft account to use it, but if you're on Windows, Copilot will automatically use the account you're signed into when using Copilot in Windows or Edge.
On the other hand, ChatGPT is only accessible via its website, and you need an account (free or paid) to use it. I'd love to see an official app that lets you bring it up from a desktop client. The ability to add it to apps as an add-on would also be a welcome addition.
3 Letting you tweak how ChatGPT talks to you
Make ChatGPT more serious or more chatty
If you've ever used Copilot in Windows or the web, you'll know that it comes with a "conversation style" picker. More Balanced is a good middle ground between seriousness and creativity; More Precise makes Copilot professionally present its information; and More Creative allows Copilot to loosen up a little in its reply. The best setting for your conversations depends on how you intend to use Copilot. For example, More Precise is great for people who want to use Copilot in Windows to manage their system, while the creative style is best for art-related prompts.
I'd like ChatGPT to also have a tone-setter built in. People use AI chatbots for all kinds of reasons. Some want it to perform serious and thorough research, while others may want it to tell them a story or imagine something fantastical. I think having something akin to Copilot's conversation style setting will allow people to tweak how ChatGPT handles their prompts to fit their needs better.
2 Sourcing where ChatGPT gets its information comes from
Helping build faith in its own information
Relying purely on artificial intelligence for factual information is a bad idea. AI models tend to "hallucinate," where they can't find an answer in their training, so they use patterns to either make up facts or use incorrect data and act like it's true. There's a lot of risk using an AI chatbot Is what the AI saying really true? Is it spouting bad data or did it just misconstrue something?
Copilot works to solve that problem using citations. If you ask it to sum up a topic, it will do so, but it will also source the information that it spits out. If you're suspicious about what the AI is saying, you can click on the link and see where it got that data from. Or, if you're performing research on a topic, you can cite the source that Copilot finds in your report.
If the people at OpenAI want its users to trust what ChatGPT says, there needs to be a bit more accountability. ChatGPT should begin citing where it's getting its information from, not only so that we can check the accuracy but so we can use the source ourselves.
1 Granting free access to advanced AI tools
Why pay for what you can get for free?
Here's a little secret: You don't need to pay for ChatGPT Plus to use ChatGPT 4 or DALL-E 3 integration. Copilot has it all for free. As part of Microsoft's plan to enhance Copilot's capabilities, the company bumped up Copilot's AI model to GPT-4 Turbo and added DALL-E 3 integration. If you want to use either of these tools, you can just fire up a conversation with Copilot and ask it to do those things.
That's not to say that ChatGPT Plus is a waste of money. It still provides some cool features, like letting you create your own GPTs for custom use. But if you just want to dabble with the latest in GPT technology, or you want to generate AI art every so often, you can save yourself a $20 monthly fee and use Copilot instead. As such, I'd love to see OpenAI release some of its features tied up in the ChatGPT Plus plan and instead use it to offer services and features that no other AI model can do.
ChatGPT is great, but it's not perfect
As influential as ChatGPT has been in the AI market, there are still ways it can improve. And with companies all over the world creating their own LLMs to take advantage of this surge of progression, we're seeing innovations in artificial intelligence technology that ChatGPT has yet to capitalize on. Hopefully, OpenAI will add these features to ChatGPT in the future.