My Initial Test of OpenAI ChatGPT on a Real Estate Question
ChatGPT Will Not Be Replacing Human Insight and Judgment Anytime Soon
What in the world is OpenAI ChatGPT? Why should you care? After all, you are a real estate investor, not some nerdy AI tech person. Keep reading.
Among other things, I have a fascination with productivity tools, especially ones for content writing, keyword research, and SEO ranking. In the artificial intelligence (AI) world, models have been undergoing steady development to the point where short-form content on a subject can be generated simply by a word or question inquiry. Yet always beware of plagiarism.
There are individuals out there that are touting (prematurely, I might add) that GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) will replace the need for research and content writing. Your document will be written for you simply by entering a keyword or two and hitting Submit. That, in my opinion, is over the top, but I guess it can attract individuals to invest in the company.
Some other GPT models are already out there and being used for a variety of language-related tasks, including language translation, text summarization, and text generation.
There’s a New AI Bot in Town
It’s ChatGPT released last month. You may want to pay attention as a real estate investor when on the hunt for information.
This tool from OpenAI, a power player in AI, lets you type questions using natural language that the chatbot answers in conversational language.
The bot even remembers the thread of your dialog, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. Its answers are derived from huge volumes of information on the internet.
It’s a big deal. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable, if not omniscient. It can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative, per CNET.
You can ask it encyclopedia questions like, “Explain Newton’s laws of motion.” You can tell it, “Write me a poem,” and when it does, say, “Now make it more exciting.”
Not So Fast
Here’s the rub. ChatGPT doesn’t exactly know anything. It’s an AI that’s trained to recognize patterns in vast swaths of text harvested from the internet, then further trained with human assistance to deliver more useful, better dialog. The answers you get may sound plausible, but they might well be entirely wrong, as even its creator OpenAI warns.
So What Does ChatGPT Have To Do With Real Estate?
There are times when all of us have some doubt about real estate terminology or some aspect of a transaction. Perhaps we don’t understand a particular clause in the contract. We will go on the web and search this website or multiple other sites for some answers to a question that we perhaps have not even phrased properly. It’s a time suck and often frustrating. Let me just say it. It’s a pain to do.
Enter ChatGPT as a solution that will cut the info search time down and can interpret what you are trying to find out. It can provide you with a conversational and understandable response in no time.
Imagine This
What if you were to ask ChatGPT to automatically write a Georgia real estate contract or addendum that contains clauses or phraseology that you have specified? Perhaps you turn around and then ask ChatGPT if your clause is legal in Savannah, GA, where this deal is being transacted. Maybe you ask ChatGPT to give the pluses and minuses of doing a wraparound mortgage in Pittsburgh, PA?
That is what I did with a more general question to ChatGPT. The question was to compare the upsides and downsides of wraparound mortgages. ChatGPT came back with 3 upsides and 5 downsides on one page with expanded reasons why in less than 30 seconds. I know once I get used to how ChatBPT responds, I will be able to ask further follow-up questions to get responses to a GRANULAR level.
That is where this is going in our immediate lifetime too. Would I still talk with an attorney to review a contract for legality? Absolutely. But I know that I am going to lower my due diligence costs and save time vs. the attorney writing up a new document from scratch for a big dollar fee.
Did I say that ChatGPT is FREE at this point in time?
In the next column, I will write out the wraparound mortgage response I received from ChatGPT and expand on how we might exploit AI to our advantage as real estate investors.
Until next time.