A lot has been written about OpenAI's unveiling of ChatGPT. It's garnered a very excited response. To summarise, it's a chatbot. By responding to prompts, it can answer questions, create stories, and it remembers its previous responses. Its core function is to mimic a human conversation.
What separates it from other chatbots is the absurd amount of data behind it – 300 billion words' worth. But how much of that is related to accounting? Can ChatGPT actually be useful in our day-to-day? Let's have a look!
The truth of it is that, although the chatbot has tons of resources to pull from, they're spread out widely. ChatGPT is more than willing to pontificate confidently on just about any subject. Asking for the common traits of the red-breasted merganser, ChatGPT will happily rattle off a list of bullet points. Ask it for some tips for data visualisation, and it will do the same. It certainly has a breadth of knowledge, but does it have any depth?
So, the question is: how much confidence can you put in ChatGPT? If you go to the website, it makes very clear that this is a "research preview". It also makes clear, when you ask it certain questions, that it has a knowledge cut-off in 2021. Anything that has happened since then is beyond its capabilities. Sometimes, though, it won't clarify its limitations, leaving you with confident answers that are false or misleading.
So, what does ChatGPT know about accounting? Well, when presented with questions from a sample assurance paper, the bot scored 42%. This is not a passing mark, but it's impressive for a piece of technology still in development. As the score indicates, some of ChatGPT's answers were surprisingly astute, while some of the others were a fair bit off-base. But, even when ChatGPT is wrong, it will still answer very confidently.
So, where is its worth? Well, ChatGPT is very good at one thing that can aid accountants – it knows code. So, you can plug in a mass of raw text, and it can create tables, CVS files, and Python scripts. It will quite quickly churn out something that can take a long time to figure out on your own! Similarly, if you're stuck deep within an Excel spreadsheet, ChatGPT might be a tool you can turn to. The bot is pretty good at creating functions in Excel, if you describe clearly what you're looking to do.
Ultimately, the best way to figure out if ChatGPT will help your workday is by playing around with it. For some accountants, it could prove pretty useful. Others will shrug. But, as the AI is developed, the benefits of ChatGPT may well become clearer. It's still very experimental, but some of its capabilities are clearly of use for accountants.
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