Chat GPT : How Will It Change The World?
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Roshan Amiri
- . March 7, 2023
- . Update: March 7, 2023 10:29 pm
ChatGPT is the new “AI” that’s taking the world by storm with its human-like performance, if you keep up with the news.
It is common knowledge that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will arrive. If we are afraid, we should have prepared for it sooner. As we enter the Communication 3.0 era, Artificial Intelligence is replacing the Communication 2.0 era of the internet, which replaced the traditional media of print and television (Communication 1.0).
It would be interesting to discuss a few of the implications of ChatGPT, and whether its impact is more exciting or terrifying.
The education system
A lot of concern has been raised about ChatGPT’s potential impact on education. Students can now create thousands of words effortlessly.
The new “ChatGPT makes a lot of errors” is the new “Anyone can edit Wikipedia!” The only difference is that ChatGPT usually passes a plagiarism check.
In response, schools from New York to Seattle to the UK have blocked ChatGPT on internal computers. Naturally, this will inconvenience poor and rural students without reliable home internet.
Essays that can be completed at home should be totally scrapped. Essays have always perpetuate inequality and are easily cheated on. It has never been possible for plagiarism detectors to stop someone from paying an Indian history teacher $20 to write an essay for them, or from asking their mother or boyfriend to do it as a favor.
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The real impact of ChatGPT is to democratize cheating. Yahoo Answers / Quora / Reddit make it easy to get your maths or French homework done online. Nobody cares too much since students would get caught out very quickly in a real, in-person test.
A moral panic about online AI killing off essays is absurd, since at-home essays have no value. Their prevalence speaks more to the lethargy of the educational world than to their effectiveness.
ChatGPT might move us closer to a world with fewer bullshit essays and more focus on oral examinations and fair in-person tests.
A realistic AI-generated content would seem to have a greater impact on thesis defences at the higher education level.
The jobs
ChatGPT’s ability to help people get jobs shouldn’t worry us too much. If an employer hires someone for a nice cover letter without verifying that they’re capable of producing equivalent content themselves, they’re only to blame.
In fact, I hope that the engine’s capabilities will lead to reforms in the job application process, which is notoriously uncorrelated with job performance.
But what about using ChatGPT while actually doing your job? However, that raises more questions. ChatGPT can do more than just grunt work — it can also provide business plans, write articles, and suggest advertising taglines. This may not work well right now, but it will surely improve in the future.
I think writers at the Financial Times and Al Jazeera will probably be able to squeeze a few hundred words out without resorting to ChatGPT, but content mills must be very worried. When the internet can do it for free and instantly, why should you pay writers even small amounts to produce low-quality work?
I wonder if good-quality chatbots like this will make it even harder to talk to a real person when you have a problem with customer service.
Secondly, the ease of generating content may cause problems. For instance, if banks are inundated with ChatGPT-written business plans or newspapers with ChatGPT-written op-eds, this could increase business costs.
Additionally, the engine will reduce the amount of grunt work required for otherwise creative jobs. For example, we will still need computer programmers, but debugging will become much faster and easier, which will have an impact on those unable to learn new skills.
Politics & Media
Will ChatGPT result in a flood of “fake news”?
The team behind it have tried to restrict its availability in authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China and Iran. Furthermore, they’ve tried to restrict how the bot will behave on controversial topics. For example, if you ask the bot to argue that the Holocaust didn’t happen, it might refuse to do so.
But once the technology exists, limiting its capabilities and access will be virtually impossible. Many people in China have already begun using it with a combination of a VPN and a foreign phone number, and the engine has already been jailbroken to provide instructions on how to prepare a Molotov cocktail or nuclear bomb.
Although these things were possible with existing technology, ChatGPT will enable unprecedented scale by lowering the barrier to entry.
A valuable point made by Tyler Cowen of Bloomberg about ChatGPT’s potential impact on US politics is as follows:
“ChatGPT can easily write to a member of Congress praising or criticizing a particular policy, and that letter will be at least as good as what many constituents would write.
As time goes on, interest groups will employ ChatGPT, and artificial but intelligent content will flood the political system.”
However, Cowen is still undemocratic because it separates this from misinformation. There are plenty of intelligent arguments in favour of abolishing borders or income taxes, but politicians would be dangerous if they mistakenly believed their constituents wanted those things because of AI-generated messages.
Although adjustments will be made, such as giving greater priority to in-person opinions, ChatGPT and other online engines will certainly have negative consequences. Will spam be harder to detect through email filters?
In addition to writing phishing emails, ChatGPT can also write malware, such as computer viruses. Having given it a lot of thought, I don’t think ChatGPT will change the world, although reports that it might be integrated into Microsoft’s default browser suggest that Google Search might suffer a setback.
It’s an online tool like anything else, although it’s well-made and useful. It should make a lot of minor tasks easier. A comment I read online gave me pause for thought. It was something like this:
My heart can’t help but feel uneasy about the idea that we seem closer to automating song-writing than hotel room cleaning.
What do you think of ChatGPT and other advanced public AI services — a terrifying sci-fi concept coming to life, a herald of a bright new future, or just an excellent SEO tool?
