ChatGPT+Pour-Over/Latte Art Coffee Robots: New Challenges for Barista Professional Development

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Introduction to ChatGPT

Recently, something called ChatGPT has gone viral, breaking through 100 million registered users in just over two months since its launch. As someone who works with words, I naturally pulled up a seat early to watch the spectacle unfold.

Let me briefly introduce ChatGPT. It's a text-based Q&A AI developed by OpenAI that responds to your textual inputs with corresponding answers. This might not seem like groundbreaking technology at first glance. However, after chatting with it for a while, you'll discover that it's quite different from ordinary AI assistants.

Exploring ChatGPT's Capabilities

As netizens explored further, they discovered that ChatGPT can not only engage in contextual conversations with you but also help you write essays, solve math problems, create copywriting, and even write code. There have even been cases where students submitted essays written by ChatGPT, and their supervisors couldn't detect that they were AI-generated.

Of course, sometimes it can also confidently talk nonsense.

Testing ChatGPT with Coffee Knowledge

I also wanted to test ChatGPT with coffee-related questions to see if it could withstand the challenge. However, I was blocked by the complicated registration process, so I'll use some coffee questions asked by others to demonstrate its capabilities.

As you can see, ChatGPT handles simple coffee questions fluently and logically. Of course, when faced with more vague questions, ChatGPT's responses can be grandiose and empty, lacking constructive value. However, if you pose well-defined questions, ChatGPT will provide solutions based on the conditions you give. For example, when some netizens asked it to create a script for filming coffee roasting, ChatGPT's response was quite impressive.

Understanding ChatGPT's Limitations

Of course, when facing specialized questions, ChatGPT often confidently provides misinformation that seems reasonable at first glance but is filled with errors upon closer inspection. ChatGPT is not truly a self-aware AI; it's just smarter than the voice assistants we commonly encounter.

This brings us to the meaning of GPT - its full name is Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Simply put, it has strong learning capabilities. With a sufficiently large database, it can process, break down, and reconstruct database content to establish a complex predictive model. Then it can effectively present database content according to your requests.

AI's learning capabilities are evident to all. For example, the AI image generation that became very popular last August initially produced very abstract images with various structural inconsistencies. As users continued to train the models, recent outputs have achieved photorealistic quality that can be difficult to distinguish from reality.

The Future of AI in Various Industries

ChatGPT is more like an intelligent search engine. Ordinary search engines present hundreds of thousands of possible answers you might want to know, while ChatGPT attempts to understand what you're looking for and optimizes to provide the single answer you want. Moreover, if you feedback that this isn't the answer you wanted, it will continue to optimize based on your feedback.

Therefore, its applications extend beyond netizens' play to productive uses, such as customer service, copywriting planning, content editing, legal secretarial work, and other language-related industries. Unsurprisingly, this has once again sparked discussions about which industries' jobs AI might take away.

Clearly, jobs like baristas that don't involve language and text shouldn't face much threat from this AI. However, when combined with previous coffee robots, the situation becomes uncertain.

Coffee Robots and Human Baristas

Several years ago, robots proficient in both latte art and pour-over coffee already appeared and have been operating in a small number of coffee shops. In terms of technique and stability, they surpass human capabilities. However, everyone believed that robots wouldn't replace baristas because robots lack face-to-face communication and sharing - they are emotionless brewing machines.

But if paired with an encyclopedia-like ChatGPT that can occasionally educate customers about coffee knowledge, sometimes confidently talk nonsense (as a joke), and continuously optimize language skills through customer interactions, then the only reason baristas might not be replaced would be that their wages remain lower than the cost of robots.

Of course, the current version of ChatGPT cannot replace practitioners in any industry, but let's not forget that AI's learning capabilities are very strong. Finally, no matter how powerful AI becomes, it's difficult to take away all jobs in a profession, but eliminating some people is still quite easy.

Image source: Internet

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