Can Base ChatGPT be Used for Forecasting without Additional Optimization?

Understand

This study investigates whether OpenAI's ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4 can forecast future events.

• To evaluate the accuracy of the predictions, we take advantage of the fact that the training data at the time of our experiments (mid 2023) stopped at September 2021, and ask about events that happened in 2022.
• We employed two prompting strategies: direct prediction and what we call future narratives which ask ChatGPT to tell fictional stories set in the future with characters retelling events that happened in the past, but after ChatGPT's training data had been collected.
• We prompted ChatGPT to engage in storytelling, particularly within economic contexts.