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Current Capabilities and Limitations

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Welcome to the Current Capabilities and Limitations page. This will provide you with a starting point to explore further discussions on the capabilities and limitations of GenAI tools. 

GenAI tools continue to improve as they train which means that their capabilities and limitations will change over time and may vary from tool to tool depending on how it was trained. During this project, several key capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT emerged.

Please explore the links below to find specific information you are looking for on this page.

Capabilities

  • Produces easy to understand text in plain English
  • Produces grammatically correct and generally well-structured text
  • Summarises or distils key points from a text
  • Solves math problems
  • Writes code
  • With plug-ins, can generate graphs/charts/images
  • Brainstorms ideas
  • Converses with the user and answers questions

Limitations

  • Hallucinations (inaccurate or made-up information)
  • Biases based on training data
  • Produces surface-level or general information (not capable of critical analysis)
  • Does not always provide citations or references (or produces fake ones)
  • Struggles to respond to specific word count requests
  • Does not always respond to prompts accurately and can require several specific prompts to refine to the desired output
  • Limited to training data (many tools are only trained on data up to a certain date so are not aware of up-to-date or specific information)
  • Code produced is accurate but is the most straightforward and basic version of the code so it is not robust or secure and would not stand up in many real-world applications

Further Information

Critical AI Literacy

Learn about privacy concerns, biases, environmental impact, and worker exploitation in GenAI tools. Develop responsible AI use.

Find Out More

Lexicon of Terminology

A comprehensive Lexicon of Terminology for AI, including definitions of AI, algorithms, bias, data, deep learning, generative AI, and more. Enhance your understanding of AI concepts.

Find Out More

Learning about GenAI

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a subset of AI that uses patterns from training data to generate new text, audio, or media. Learn how it works and its capabilities.

Find Out More

Toolkit for the Ethical Use of GenAI in Learning and Teaching

(AI)2ed Project

Toolkit for the Ethical Use of GenAI by Loretta Goff and Tadhg Dennehy, UCC Skills Centre. This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International ,

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