ChatGPT: A Promising Yet Controversial Future for AI Content

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by Jacob Solomon Mar 10, 2023 News
ChatGPT: A Promising Yet Controversial Future for AI Content
  • What it is. ChatGPT is a form of generative AI that creates new content in various forms, including text, audio and images by understanding context and relevancy. It has potential applications in education, marketing, ecommerce, legal and software development.
  • Concerns about generative AI. While ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI have significant potential benefits, there are also several concerns to consider, including the potential for inaccurate information, dangerous propaganda, cybersecurity threats and the replacement of human workers.
  • A new transformation with serious caveats. Despite the concerns, the rise of generative AI represents a significant transformation in how we discover, search, create and work. It has the potential to enable a new level of productivity, but it will require careful consideration of ethical and regulatory issues.

Since it was created by a human, I will spare you one more article that begins with this. It has taken the world by storm since it was debut a few months ago. It's important to take a step back from the hype, assess the benefits, weigh the challenges and slowly carve out its role in how we work and create

Unlike traditional artificial intelligence systems that are trained only to recognize patterns, the new content in the form of images, text, audio and other content can be programmed to understand context and relevancy. It is generating brand new content that is human like.

The industries that can have great benefits are listed below.

  • Education: ChatGPT can help students develop essays or complete homework assignments. For example, a high school student can ask it to create a haiku poem about nature for a poetry class or develop a report on the first settlers in Puerto Rico. Within minutes pretty good drafts are created.
  • Marketing: These systems can help jumpstart marketing campaigns, creating taglines, developing blog posts or other types of content. Simply provide the goal and key messages and it’s on it, providing a pretty good place to start.
  • Ecommerce: Much like other chatbots, ChatGPT can play a role in customer service, but taking it to a whole other level, answering customer questions, providing more information on the company’s products and services and anticipating new questions.
  • Legal: ChatGPT can be used by lawyers to gather data on prior court proceedings and develop oral arguments or even by judges to decide on cases. It also could be used by individuals to assist in the creation of a living will.
  • Software Development: Software programmers are already using AI to generate code using Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which employs OpenAI. It helps developers write and fix code, and Microsoft estimates that Copilot generates 40% of the code, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

It is already replacing humans in the workplace.

Microsoft recently announced a $10 billion investment in Openai and is working to integrate it into its solutions, including its search engine Bing. A generative artificial intelligence-driven solution is being developed by a Chinese internet search engine company. Sparrow is a solution developed by DeepMind, a British company that is part of theAlphabet. The rival called "Apprentice Bard" uses a model developed by the internet giant.

There is no doubt that more and more players will be entering the ring to refine and expand their solutions. Users will continually improve these types of bot as they play around with them. There are precautions and challenges that need to be overcome today.

According to the New York Times, the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, has tried to set realistic expectations and warn users about the potential for inaccurate information. JP Morgan and other companies have banned their employees from using the service because of concerns about sharing customer data.

Humans put customer experience outcomes to the test.

The Caveats to Consider With ChatGPT

There are other concerns that need to be addressed in order to ensure the safe use of the bot.

  • Dangerous propaganda: Taken to the extreme, millions of ChatGPT bots could be programmed and deployed to appear as humans or deep fakes, having conversations designed to convince unwitting people of a particular point of view or to share misinformation.
  • Cybersecurity: Given its ability to sort through massive amount of data, generative AI has the potential to make it easier for bad actors to more easily create malware.
  • Replacing workers: Especially for industries, such as marketing, customer service and software development, there are serious concerns about ChatGPT’s ability to do the work of many humans. This is not a new concern, given the level of automation already occurring in the industry, yet the sheer size, ease of use and power of ChatGPT, means that the man-versus-machine debate can go into overdrive. 
  • Copyright concerns: When someone works off of content prepared by ChatGPT, how can they be sure they are properly citing the source? According to Bern Elliot of Gartner, “the model is trained on a corpus of created works and it is still unclear what the legal precedent may be for reuse of this content, if it was derived from the intellectual property of others.”

A Transformational Era Driven by Artificial Intelligence

There still remains the issue of creativity and genuineness even though there are more concrete concerns about generative artificial intelligence. Are we creating a new generation of people who don't know how to conduct their own research, form their own opinions and apply it to a written piece of content when students use it to generate research and written content? Will human exploration and discovery go the way of the encyclopedia or the library, or will it allow them to gain even more knowledge faster thanks to the internet?

Even if it provides a quicker route to knowledge and content creation, will everyone's written creations sound the same, with one word being used because it follows the highest statistical probability from the previous word?

There are many issues that need to be addressed, and regulatory guidance will need to be developed about the role transparency must play. Corporate, public and individual ethics are required.

There is no doubt that we are on the verge of a change in how we discover, search, create and work. As with all automation, humans must continue to drive the bus.

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