etikonaija.comWhat is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT has become a useful tool in this age of science and technology capable of reshaping our understanding of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). ChatGPT for starters is an AI-powered chatbot founded by OpenAI. This distinctive AI understands natural language and transforms it in a way that it is capable of achieving and executing tasks faster, better, and more efficiently than humans.
OpenAI and ChatGPT
ChatGPT is owned by OpenAI, a research organization founded in 2015 by a group of scientists, researchers, and entrepreneurs. These founders include Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. The purpose of developing ChatGPT is to use artificial general intelligence for the development of humanity. ChatGPT is an acronym for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. GPT is an intelligent language model tool that is used to decode and generate human-like text. Its origins could be traced to OpenAI’s research to develop advanced natural language processing (NLP) models with the ability to understand and generate human-like text.
ChatGPT Uses
The advancement achieved by ChatGPT in that it is capable of understanding natural language and processes has brought about a change that has benefited industries. This change is seen in applications like virtual assistants, customer service chatbots, and language translation tools. ChatGPT has become a resourceful tool for businesses, researchers, healthcare practitioners, and developers who use it for automation, research, etc. ChatGPT’s versatility has been used in the area of creative writing, entertainment, and communication.
It is interesting to note that with the help of ChatGPT, humans, and machines can now easily interact across digital platforms seamlessly. Apart from using ChatGPT to get answers to difficult questions, solve mathematical problems, rectify errors in codes, and resolve human issues, the AI-powered machine has helped make communication on the web more efficient, enhancing the way we communicate among diverse channels.
Problems with ChatGPT
Its ability to automate difficult tasks has brought about efficient service delivery for businesses. It has helped make customer support and content creation easier, helping many companies save money. However, ChatGPT is far from flawless, even though it has transformed how humans interact with machines. ChatGPT has become notorious for its penchant to spread fake news, misinformation and cook up events that never happened, and pass it off as reality. This misgiving, called AI hallucination, has become a problem that programmers and engineers fight daily to tackle.
Steven Schwartz, a top US lawyer became a joke in the legal profession after he used ChatGPT to conduct legal research. To the chagrin of those he was representing, he fell victim to AI Hallucination after ChatGPT provided him with non-existent cases that he presented in court. He had appeared before a judge to back up his client’s case with what he thought were precedents. Shockingly, the judge discovered that the cases cited by ChatGPT, on which Schwartz relied, never existed. Schwartz had to beg not to be sanctioned after admitting that he had relied on ChatGPT for his legal research, which proved rather embarrassing for him and those he represented.
It is right to say that ChatGPT has the potential to spread misinformation, foster biases, and mimic harmful behaviors. This unethical aspect of AI must be tackled holistically to avoid its escalation on a larger scale. ChatGPT has also been accused of discrimination and bias. Ido Vock, a writer for the New Statesman Newspaper highlighted in a 2022 article the versatility of ChatGPT. He also brought out the other side of AI technology that many people have been expressing fear about. In the article, he detailed how the ChatGPT wrote racially biased and discriminatory articles against Barack Obama after it was prompted to do so. Vock pointed out that it is sad that ChatGPT is programmed to be capable of generating offensive or harmful content. It is indeed disheartening that ChatGPT is built in a way that it can be racist, Vock concluded.
It has been explained that this flaw (spreading false information, racist and harmful content) exhibited by ChatGPT is a result of biases in its training data. An AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, Kanta Dihal, while explaining further, stated that the racist and biased nature of ChatGPT could be a result of it being trained on hundreds of billions of words taken from public sources and the internet.
In 2023, a law professor from the United States, Jonathan Turley was shocked to learn that ChatGPT falsely included him in a list of legal scholars who have sexually abused people. ChatGPT went as far as citing a fake article it had claimed was published by The Post to back its claim. However, following the discovery, The Post denied ever publishing such a list on its magazine/websites. Professor Turley took to Twitter to call out OpenAI over the false claim.
…I learned that ChatGPT falsely reported on a claim of sexual harassment that was never made against me on a trip that never occurred while I was on a faculty where I never taught. ChapGPT relied on a cited Post article that was never written and quotes a statement that was…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) April 6, 2023
He said ChatGPT generated the list after a lawyer conducting research had prompted the AI-powered chatbot to provide a list of legal scholars with a history of sexual harassment. ChatGPT further claimed that Professor Turley made sexually suggestive comments and even attempted to touch a student during a class trip to Alaska. In a Twitter post, the professor clarified that he never went on such a trip and never taught at the school fabricated by ChatGPT.
Conclusion
Industry stakeholders have expressed concerns over privacy and security issues associated with ChatGPT. With ChatGPT being fed large amounts of user data, it becomes difficult to safeguard the privacy and data security of its users and non-users. That is why stakeholders have advocated for regulatory oversight that would ensure that there is a regulatory framework to ensure a safe space for the AI ecosystem. This framework will ensure the ethical use of AI, transparency, and accountability.
While ChatGPT has become an indispensable tool in modern technology and development, the fears generated by the ability of this artificial intelligence to understand advanced natural language and process it in a way that its programmers do not understand its workings calls for serious concern. Issues concerning ethical use, bias, privacy, and regulation must also be considered holistically so that we do not wake up one to the reality of things we see in movies.
ChatGPT App Login
For you to access ChatGPT 3.5, it is free. You can either access it with an account or work as a guest. However, ChatGPT 4 is a paid version. A paid version gives you access to OpenAI’s most advanced ChatGPT model, with additional tools like DALL·E, Browsing, Advanced Data Analysis and more.
To use ChatGPT now, Click Here.
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