We would like to extend our appreciation to Eugene Chen for his insightful seminar on ChatGPT, presented virtually on December 7th.

The session, entitled Exploring ChatGPT *Live* with Useful, Wacky, and Scary Examples, was exceptionally popular with tickets selling out within two days. Eugene was interviewed on CBC Yukon Morning with Elyn Jones where they discussed both the content of the session and the growing popularity of the topic of AI. Eugene mentioned that ChatGPT is a helpful lens for discussing AI since it is more financially accessible and user-friendly than many other AI tools. He gave a quick overview of a few of the examples that he planned to discuss in his seminar.

Using feedback and suggestions from attendees, Eugene led us through some specific uses for ChatGPT. He presented 3 examples of real use cases for ChatGPT: Useful, Wacky, and Scary. For the useful example he inputted a poorly written paragraph into ChaptGPT and asked it to correct the errors. The AI corrected all spelling and grammatical errors and ended up producing a well written paragraph. For the wacky example the audience was asked to provide a series of random ingredients that most people would likely not eat. Eugene then inputted these ingredients into ChatGPT and asked it to produce a recipe using these ingredients. The result was a sandwich recipe made with sardines and platypus. For the final example, ChatGPT was asked to generate images of politicians which could be used to create fake endorsements and sway political opinion. Attendees were also offered a demonstration of a text-based game which Eugene programmed during a Hackathon using ChatGPT. In this game, players are presented with a collection of words which they need to assign to the correct blank spaces to form coherent sentences. ChatGPT generates the sentences, ensuring that there is an endless supply of unique sentences for players to solve.

While participants were intrigued and sometimes amused by the uses for ChatGPT, the discussion also raised some concerns regarding plagiarism and user privacy. Some industries have the potential to be negatively impacted by the use of AI. There are currently limited protections against nefarious uses of this technology. Eugene mentioned that the ethics of AI is a topic which would warrant its own presentation.

These are just a few of the examples and conversations Eugene shared in his engaging presentation. We hope Eugene will be able to join us again so we can delve further into this fascinating topic!