A year of ChatGPT: 5 ways AI has changed the world

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT, was launched to an unsuspecting public exactly one year ago.

He quickly became the fastest growing app never, in the hands of 100 million users at the end of the second month. Today, it is available to more than one billion people through Microsoft. bing searchSkype and snapchat—And OpenAI is expected to collect more more than a billion dollars in annual income.

Never before have we seen a technology implemented so quickly. It took about a decade before most people started using the web. But this time the pipes were already in place.

As a result, ChatGPT’s impact has gone far beyond writing Carol’s Shakespeare-style retirement poems. She has given many people a glimpse of our AI-driven future. Here are five ways this technology has changed the world.

1. AI Safety

ChatGPT forced governments around the world to wake up to the idea that AI poses significant challenges, not only economic, but also social and existential.

US President Joe Biden catapulted the United States to the forefront of AI regulations with a presidential executive order setting new standards for AI safety. It seeks to improve equity and civil rights, while promoting innovation and competition, and American leadership in AI.

Shortly after, the United Kingdom held the first intergovernmental AI Security Summit at Bletchley Park, the birthplace of the computer in World War II to crack the German Enigma code.

And more recently, the European Union appears to be sacrificing its early leadership in AI regulation, as it struggled to adapt its AI Law to the potential threats posed by frontier models like ChatGPT.

Although Australia remains at the bottom of the pack in terms of regulation and investment, nations around the world are increasingly directing their money, time and attention to addressing this issue, which, five years ago, was not on people’s minds. most people. .

2. Job security

Before ChatGPT, it was perhaps autoworkers and other blue-collar workers who most feared the arrival of robots. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have changed this conversation.

White-collar workers, such as graphic designers and lawyers, have also begun to worry about their jobs. A recent study of an online labor market found that income for writing and editing jobs has fallen more than 10% since ChatGPT was launched. The collaborative economy could be the canary in this coal mine.

There is enormous uncertainty about whether AI destroys more jobs than it creates. But now one thing is certain: AI will be hugely disruptive to the way we work.

3. Death of the essay

The education sector reacted with some hostility to the arrival of ChatGPT, with many schools and education authorities issuing immediate bans on its use. If ChatGPT can write essays, what will happen to assignments?

Of course, we don’t ask people to write essays because there is a shortage of them or even because many jobs require it. We ask them to write essays because it demands research skills, better communication skills, critical thinking and domain knowledge. No matter what ChatGPT offers, these skills will still be necessary, even if we spend less time developing them.

And it’s not just schoolchildren who cheat with AI. Earlier this year, a US judge fined two lawyers and a law firm US$5,000 for a court filing written with ChatGPT that Includes made-up legal citations..

I imagine these are growing pains. Education is an area where AI has a lot to offer. Great language models like ChatGPT can, for example, become excellent Socratic tutors. Intelligent tutoring systems can be infinitely patient in generating specific review questions.

4. Copyright chaos

This one is personal. Authors around the world were outraged to discover that many large language models, such as ChatGPT, were trained on hundreds of thousands of books, downloaded from the web without their consent.

The reason AI models can converse fluently about everything from AI to zoology is because they are trained on books about everything from AI to zoology. And books on AI include my own copyrighted books on AI.

The irony that an AI professor’s books on AI are being controversially used to train AI is not lost on me. There are currently multiple class action lawsuits in play in the US to determine if this is a violation of copyright laws.

ChatGPT users have even pointed out examples where chatbots have generated entire chunks of text, word by word, taken from copyrighted books.

5. Misinformation and disinformation

In the short term, one of the challenges I am most concerned about is the use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create misinformation and disinformation.

This concern goes beyond synthetic text, to falsifying audio and videos that are indistinguishable from the real thing. a bank has has already been stolen using cloned voices generated by AI.

The elections also now seem threatened. deepfakes played an unfortunate role in the 2023 Slovak parliamentary election campaign. Two days before the elections, a fake audio clip about electoral fraud purportedly featuring a well-known journalist from an independent news platform and the president of the Progressive Slovakia party reached thousands of users of social networks. Commentators have suggested that such false content could have a material impact about the election results.

According According to The Economist, more than four billion people will be asked to vote in various elections next year. What happens in such elections when we combine the reach of social media with the power and persuasion of AI-generated fake content? Will it unleash a wave of misinformation and disinformation in our already fragile democracies?

It is difficult to predict what will happen next year. But if we go by 2023, I suggest we buckle up.

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