Explained: Is ChatGPT Latest AI Innovation A Trend Or A Threat?

Launched as a prototype on November 30, 2022, Open AI's ChatGPT has caught the attention of engineers, social media, entrepreneurs, writers, and students alike. The chatbot has been built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models and is capable of communicating in a human-like manner. It is based on language mode, GPT-3.5, and ever since its launch has become a threat for some while the latest addiction for many.

ChatGTP works in a conversational interface with its user, responds to follow-up questions, admit and corrects mistakes, reject improper asks, and even challenges incorrect premises. A sibling model of InstructGPT, ChatGPT is devised to follow instructions in a prompt and/or detailed answer.

ChatGPT Fever

ChatGPT has created ripples across the younger generations and is also gradually taking several industries by storm. It has been trending on social media shortly after its November 2022 release. It has stirred the IT and AI industries, including tech giants like Google and Microsoft. A look at the recent headliners, the chatbot hit:

1. The New York Times recently reported that Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Bin have been in discussions about the company's response to ChatGPT and plan to launch more than 20 AI products by this year. A report in the Times says Google plans to “demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year”. On January 20, Google laid off over 12,000 employees including those who have been with the company in the long run, and is shifting focus to AI primarily.

2. Asia's richest man, Gautam Adani in a recent LinkedIn post talked about the chatbot and how he seems to be hooked to it. Adani revealed that the recent World Economic Forum Meeting in Davos buzzed around Artificial intelligence, recessions hitting IT companies and how it was one of his busiest WEF meetings ever. His LinkedIn post read, “The recent release of ChatGPT (I must admit to some addiction since I started using it) is a transformational moment in the democratization of AI given its astounding capabilities as well as comical failures.” Adding that the Generative AI holds the same potential and dangers, and the race is already on, with China outnumbering the US in the number of most-cited scientific papers on AI, he wrote, "This is a race that will quickly get as complex and as entangled as the ongoing silicon chip war".

3. Open AI's chatbot recently appeared in an MBA test set by professor Christian Terwiesch at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. The test was conducted on operations management course, a core MBA subject in which, as per the professor, ChatGPT has done exceptionally well. However, professor Terwiesch also added that the chatbot had its limitations in maths. “I was just overwhelmed by the beauty of the wording — concise, choice of words, structure. It was absolutely brilliant... but the math is so horrible”, the professor was quoted as per several media reports.

Be Wary Of The AI

While on one hand, engineers, entrepreneurs, and many social media users look at AI as a bold innovation that opens horizons for services and solutions; the academic and creative industry stands both concerned and threatened by the latest AI chatbot. New York Times author Ezra Klein called ChatGPT an 'information warfare machine' and even raised questions on the implications of releasing such a form of technology at a large scale. The soaring popularity of ChatGPT has caught the worries of social scientists and scholars alike.

There have been several speculations as well as incidents that have proven the potential threats, the AI poses to human civilization. The chatbot puts the writer's community at great risk as it seems to write scholarly pieces, poems, and even books with utmost ease, and without much creative brainstorming. There have also been reports of people using ChatGPT to cover up for their terrible communication skills and making the chatbot talk to their dating app matches. 
The innovation is also likely to make cheating easier for school and college students since the AI would only take a few minutes to furbish a brand-new paper, project, or thesis. It was also reported that a consultancy firm found that applications written by ChatGPT were beating out 80 per Cent of those worked by humans.

Mission GPTZero

Twenty-Two-Year-Old Edward Tian, a senior news writer for The Daily Princetonian is on a mission to combat the threats of ChatGPT. A senior at Princeton University, Tian is pursuing a major in Computer Science and a minor in Journalism. After first learning about the interactive chatbot, he asked it to write raps for him.

Tian is currently writing his thesis on artificial intelligence detection. In the past couple of years, he has studied the GPT-3 AI system, aforementioned as the sibling and predecessor to ChatGPT. GPT-3 was a lot less user-friendly, largely inaccessible to the general public, and was behind a paywall. It was during his studies at Princeton's Natural Language Processing Lab that Tian researched and learned how to detect and identify texts written by the AI system while working at Princeton's Natural Language Processing Lab.

"I think we're absolutely at an inflection point, this technology is incredible. I do believe it's the future. But, at the same time, it's like we're opening Pandora's Box. And we need safeguards to adopt it responsibly", Tian was quoted saying as per media reports.

His coding software, GPTZero has shown a ray of hope in the fight for human intelligence versus AI.