OpenAI's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT was released to an unsuspecting public exactly a 12 months ago.
It quickly became the fastest-growing app of all time and was within the hands of 100 million users by the top of its second month. Today, it's available to greater than a billion people across Microsoft's Bing search, Skype and Snapchat – and OpenAI is anticipated to generate greater than $1 billion in annual revenue.
We have never seen a technology adopted so quickly. It took a few decade for most individuals to start out using the Internet. But this time the lines were already in place.
As a result, ChatGPT's impact extends far beyond writing Shakespearean poems about Carol's retirement. It has given many individuals a taste of our AI-powered future. Here are five ways this technology has modified the world.
1. AI security
ChatGPT forced governments all over the world to wake as much as the concept AI poses significant challenges – not only economic challenges, but in addition societal and existential challenges.
US President Joe Biden catapulted the US to the forefront of AI regulations with an executive order setting latest standards for AI safety. The goal is to enhance justice and civil rights while promoting innovation and competition and U.S. leadership in AI.
Shortly afterwards, the UK hosted the first-ever intergovernmental AI security summit in Bletchley Park – the positioning where the pc was born to crack the German Enigma code during World War II.
And more recently, the European Union appeared to sacrifice its early leadership role in AI regulation because it struggled to adapt its AI law to potential threats posed by frontier models like ChatGPT.
Although Australia continues to lag behind relating to regulation and investment, nations all over the world are increasingly focusing their money, time and a spotlight on solving this problem that was not on most individuals's minds five years ago.
2. Job security
Before ChatGPT, it was perhaps autoworkers and other blue-collar staff who most feared the arrival of robots. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have modified this conversation.
Employees reminiscent of graphic designers and lawyers are actually also nervous about their jobs. A recent study of a web based job market found that revenue for writing and editing jobs has dropped by greater than 10% since ChatGPT was introduced. The gig economy could possibly be the canary on this coal mine.
There is great uncertainty about whether AI will destroy more jobs than it should create. But one thing is now certain: AI will change the best way we work enormously.
3. Death of the essay
The education sector reacted to the introduction of ChatGPT with some hostility, and many faculties and education authorities issued immediate bans on using ChatGPT. If ChatGPT can write essays, what happens to homework?
Of course, we don't ask anyone to put in writing essays because there’s a shortage of essays or because many roles require it. We ask them to put in writing essays as this requires research skills and improves communication skills, critical considering and subject knowledge. Regardless of what ChatGPT offers, these capabilities will still be needed, even when we spend less time developing them.
And it's not only schoolchildren who cheat with AI. Earlier this 12 months, a US judge fined two lawyers and a law firm $5,000 for a court filing written on ChatGPT that contained fabricated legal citations.
I can imagine these are growing pains. Education is an area where AI has so much to supply. For example, large language models like ChatGPT could be optimized into excellent Socratic tutors. And intelligent tutoring systems could be infinitely patient relating to generating targeted review questions.
4. Copyright chaos
This one is personal. Authors all over the world were outraged to find that many large language models like ChatGPT were trained on a whole bunch of hundreds of books downloaded from the Internet without their consent.
The reason AI models can converse fluently about all the pieces from AI to zoology is because they’re trained with books about all the pieces from AI to zoology. And books about AI include my very own copyrighted books about AI.
The irony shouldn’t be lost on me that an AI professor's books on AI are being controversially used to coach AI. Several class motion lawsuits are currently underway within the US to find out whether this constitutes a copyright infringement.
ChatGPT users have even identified examples where chatbots have generated entire blocks of text verbatim from copyrighted books.
5. Misinformation and disinformation
One challenge that worries me most within the short term is using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create misinformation and disinformation.
This concern goes beyond synthetic text and concerns deepfake audio and videos which can be indistinguishable from real ones. A bank has already been robbed using AI-generated cloned voices.
Elections also now seem like under threat. Deepfakes played an unlucky role in Slovakia's 2023 parliamentary election campaign. Two days before the election, a fake audio clip about electoral fraud purporting to feature a well known journalist from an independent news platform and the leader of the Progressive Slovakia party reached hundreds of social media users. Commentators have suggested that such fake content could have a major impact on the election end result.
According to The Economist, greater than 4 billion people will probably be called to vote in various elections next 12 months. What happens in elections like these once we mix the reach of social media with the ability and persuasive power of AI-generated fake content? Will it unleash a wave of misinformation and disinformation on our already fragile democracies?
It is difficult to predict what is going to develop next 12 months. But relating to 2023, I suggest we buckle up.
