The apprehension about artificial intelligence has been around since the technology first emerged. The worries have ranged from eliminating the need for human workers and promoting privacy invasion to launching nuclear missiles and spurring a robot uprising.
Now include plagiarism, intellectual theft and educational cheating to the list. This thanks to a San Francisco-based non-profit organization called Open AI and its new software, ChatGPT, a tool some are calling an amazing leap forward in AI technology.
GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, which is as difficult to technologically explain as it is to say. But what ChatGPT does is more straightforward.
In the simplest terms, ChatGPT can take a request or query from a person and write a comprehensive document on just about any topic in a seemingly endless array of formats. And it can do it in a fraction of the time a human can.
ChatGPT can mimic writings from certain time periods and by specific authors. If someone hasn’t written much, don’t worry. The AI software can listen to audio in the form of speeches, sermons and spoken presentations and mimic that in writing as well.
ChatGPT can generate letters, recipes, song lyrics, therapy sessions, essays, outlines, research papers and even poems and limericks. It can write documents in the format of the King James Bible, Charles Dickens or the Colonial Period of the 17th Century. Though the technology is only three months old, the first books using ChatGPT already have been published.
Suffice it to say, it’s a highly disruptive technology. Some educators are arguing that it’s too disruptive, and a real temptation for students who want to produce a paper without using the brain power to do the research and writing.
Despite the hue and cry from some quarters about this new technology, we shouldn’t be totally surprised. AI-driven platforms have been imitating human writing and speech for a while. The online chatbots used by many retailers and service companies aren’t perfect, but they’re getting better.
In Indiana, a Bloomington company has long ago proven that a piece of software can write a complete sports story using nothing more than a box score and a little historical data. That same company has used its software to write market reports for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from nothing more than raw market data. Those stories have been used by a growing number of outlets, including major national networks like CBS.
ChatGPT is being hailed as next level technology. Launched in November, not only does it use adaptive human-like text to answer questions, write stories and engage in dialog, it can even debug computer code, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests. It can help with things like math too. It even proved it can pass a Wharton School final exam. Oh, and it’s free to download.
School districts in Los Angeles and Baltimore have joined those in New York City and Seattle this year in blocking access to ChatGPT, as other districts – including those in Indiana – evaluate the benefits and risks that accompany the new technology.
New York City schools cited “negative impacts on student learning and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content,” adding that “the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, (but) does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”
The criticism of the new technology goes beyond education circles. Critics from various corners say ChatGPT simply parrots back what it finds on the internet, correct or not. And there is fear it could be used to flood social media with articles that are intentionally or unintentionally false but sound authoritative.
Open AI officials aren’t speaking to the media but said in a statement: “We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes – in schools or anywhere else. Our policy states that when sharing content, all users should clearly indicate that it is generated by AI in a way no one could reasonably miss or misunderstand, and we’re already developing a tool to help anyone identify text generated by ChatGPT.”
Additionally, Open AI acknowledges the limitations of the current ChatGPT platform, including the potential to occasionally generate incorrect information or biased content.
In any event, the new AI software won’t be easy to avoid. Microsoft recently announced it is weaving ChatGPT into some of its platforms, including Microsoft Word and the Bing search engine.
ChatGPT clearly has the potential to have a major impact on businesses.
Areas in which ChatGPT could help companies include drafting marketing content, brainstorming ideas, writing computer code, automating parts of the sales process, delivering aftercare services when customers buy products, providing customized instructions, streamlining and enhancing processes using automation, translating text from one language to another, smoothing out the customer onboarding process and increasing customer engagement.
Already industries ranging from health care to insurance say ChatGPT could save them millions – or even billions – of dollars annually.
“I think this is huge. I wouldn’t be surprised if 50 years from now people look back and say ‘wow that was a really seminal set of inventions that happened in the early 2020s,’ ” Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford University’s digital economy lab, recently told CBS News. “Most of the U.S. economy is knowledge and information work, and that’s who’s going to be most affected by (ChatGPT). I would put lawyers right at the top of the list, copy writers and screen writers too. But I like to use affected, not replaced because I think if done right, it’s not going to be AI replacing lawyers. It’s going to be lawyers working with AI replacing lawyers not working with AI.”
Open AI already is working on an improved version. ChatGPT4 is being created using 500 times as much data as the current version. “It’s a phase change, like going from water to steam,” says Brynjolfsson.
For the record, this article was written the old-fashioned way, by an actual human, with flesh-and-bone fingers tapping out the words on a traditional computer keyboard. Three months ago, this would have seemed like a crazy disclaimer, but now appears to be an imperative driven by a new era of AI technology.
