Since it became publicly accessible in November last year, ChatGPT – an AI chatbot created by OpenAI Company – has dominated the discourse on the internet and social media. Based on the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 or GPT-3 language paradigm, ChatGPT is capable of carrying on a conversation, responding to inquiries, producing stories, poems, and comics, as well as resolving challenging programming issues. ChatGPT has also participated in and even passed numerous challenging examinations across the globe including the Wharton MBA Exam, the American Medical Licensing Exam, and the Law School Exam, as part of esperiment. Although the chatbot recently failed the Indian UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) exam, which is the benchmark test for recruitment to higher civil services of the Government of India, Bangladeshi netizens wondered whether ChatGPT would be able to pass the BCS (Bangladesh Civil Service) exam or not. Science Bee, one of the largest science-based education platforms for youths in the country, has recently revealed on its social media platforms that ChatGPT has “successfully passed” the BCS preliminary exam, scoring 130 out of 200 marks in total. Read More: Top 5 AI Chatbot Platforms and Trends in 2023 Talking about the experiment with UNB, Science Bee Founder Mobin Sikder and Executive Member Metheela Farzana Melody shared how the team tested the chatbot for BCS exam, following a month of planning and preparation and seven days of frequent testing. “First of all, we researched how to take the test to get the most realistic results,” Mobin told UNB. “Since ChatGPT is trained on a dataset available till September 2021, we decided to conduct the test on the questions of the latest BCS exam – 44th BCS, held in May 2022.” “After selecting the exam, we collected the question papers and answers. Since the question paper is allowed to be taken away after the exam, securing it did not require much time. The answer sheet is, however, not published directly. So, we prepared the final answer sheet on our own, after multiple testing from various third-party sources,” team Science Bee explained. Language barrier emerged as a headache during the experiment as BCS exam is conducted in Bangla language and the chatbot is trained in English. It had to be translated into English in order to keep the exam fair. Read More: Google's AI Chatbot Bard: All You Need to Know In the 44th BCS, 1 mark was allotted for each question where the candidate got 1 mark for the correct answer, and 0.5 mark was deducted for each wrong answer. However, candidates had the option to skip or not answer any question; in that case, no marks were added or subtracted. The same mark distribution was provided to ChatGPT and at the beginning, it was informed about the MCQ exam and command through text prompt – and it became ready to take the exam. However, there were some picture-based questions, according to team Science Bee. Since ChatGPT-3 is not multimodal, it cannot read or understand images; hence it was not possible to input those questions, so those were rejected. Besides, it was not possible to translate some questions related to Bangla language and literature into English as it would change the thematic description. “The total number of such rejected questions was 22. As these are weaknesses of ChatGPT, invalid questions were treated as unanswered and no negative marking was done,” according to team Science Bee. The remaining 178 questions were asked to ChatGPT with options, and it answered 142 questions correctly. 24 questions were answered incorrectly and while answering the remaining 12, the chatbot stated that the correct answer option was not found. That means the chatbot got 142 marks for as many correct answers, 12 marks were deducted for providing 24 wrong answers, and no marks were deducted or added for no answer. So, as per the 44th BCS exam questions, ChatGPT passed with a total of 130 marks. Read More: ChatGPT by Open AI: All you need to know In the 44th BCS exam, a total of 3,50,716 candidates applied and of them, 2,76,760 candidates participated in the preliminary exam. Only 15,708 candidates passed the preliminary exam, according to reports. “As there is no specific pass mark for BCS and the cut-off mark is not officially released, we were in touch with several candidates who appeared for the 44th BCS exam. According to the information given by them, the cut-off mark in general cadre was 125±. Since ChatGPT secured 130 marks in our test, it can be said that ChatGPT has successfully passed BCS preliminary exam,” team Science Bee told UNB. Further explaining the performance of the chatbot, Science Bee said that according to the test, ChatGPT was able to answer the questions quite well. However, it was pretty weak in Bangla language and literature category where it answered only 5 out of 35 questions. On the other hand, it performed well in the categories of science, computer or English language and literature. It took a considerable amount of time to answer most of the questions in the mental skills or math categories correctly. “Besides, many times there have been incidents like getting stuck in the middle of answering. In that case, we had to take the help of ‘Regenerate Response’ to proceed and move forward,” team Science Bee said. Read More: AI & Future of Jobs: Will Artificial Intelligence or Robots Take Your Job? The questions for the exam were collected and translated by Metheela. Overall management of the test was conducted by Science Bee’s Content Production Head Annoy Debnath, and the final report was edited by Mobin and Sadia Binte Chowdhury. “We did this test as part of an interesting experiment and will conduct further tests with other examinations when ChatGPT-4 will be available. The chatbot is learning consistently and becoming powerful every single day, and through this type of test, we want to convey a message to aspiring learners and students that we need to move one step ahead of ChatGPT with our learnings.” “That means, we need to stop relying on memorising and copy-paste practices because ChatGPT can do it and will be doing it even better with future versions, and also there are other AI projects in the pipeline such as Google’s Bard. It can be a great assistant and companion to humankind, and it will not replace anyone if we can continue to improve our learning. That is the motto of our research, aligned with our motto and tagline ‘learn like never before’. We want people to understand the importance of learning and be skilled in order to make AI useful,” Mobin and team Science Bee told UNB. (Details of the test can be found on Science Bee's Facebook page and website.) Read More: How Can Artificial Intelligence Improve Healthcare?

For the first time in Bangladesh, a mini-comic book created with artificial intelligence (AI) was published on Sunday (January 15, 2023) night. Science Bee, one of the largest science-based education platforms for youths across the country, published the AI-generated mini-comic titled ‘Manobjatir Grohon’ on its official Facebook page at 8 pm. Regarding the publication, Science Bee said in its post: "Imagine this, an artificial intelligence program is writing stories for you, and another artificial intelligence program is illustrating the stories. Could we have imagined this a few years ago? Read More: ChatGPT by Open AI: All you need to know The script, title, character development, and illustration were all handled entirely by artificial intelligence in this science fiction comic book, produced for the first time in Bangladesh and perhaps in the Bengali language as well.” The 17-page mini-comic book narrates the journey of humankind, envisioning the end of the human race in the world and the aftermath.  “By using ChatGpt and Midjourney Ai, we created the comics. Artificial intelligence was used to produce the storyline, characters, narration, and each page image in the comic. As per our human contribution, we worked together on the translation and a little bit of Photoshop,” according to Science Bee. Read: Universal to open theme park in Texas for young kids Co-created with human assistance by Annoy Debnath, the free mini-comic book has already created a buzz on Facebook and is receiving positive feedback from its readers. Founded by Mobin Sikder, a student of Chemistry at Jahangirnagar University, Science Bee was founded in 2018. The purpose of this platform is to transform diversity and inclusivity of science and technology, to reach the under-served community, and to increase the number of those actively engaged and involved in science and technology. The mini-comic is available at https://www.sciencebee.com.bd/ebook-3/. Read More: 7 Top AI Writing Tools, Software to Generate Human-Like Text