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With a wave of AI products, cybersecurity concerns, potential job losses and the spreading of misinformation, ChatGPT was a Pandora’s Box that has impacted various industries.
Artificial intelligence has been front and centre for the majority of 2023 and a large amount of that focus can be attributed to ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI.
On this date last year, OpenAI released the AI chatbot to the public, presenting a conversational form of AI that quickly saw a surge in popularity. ChatGPT’s selling point was generative AI – a form of the technology that can create various content such as text, images and audio.
The concept of generative AI had been gaining momentum before the launch of ChatGPT – largely driven by various text-to-image generators such as Dall-E and the similarly named – but unconnected – Dall-E Mini.
But ChatGPT was the product that truly brought the concept into the mainstream, as social media flooded with examples of the chatbot’s capabilities. The AI model had reached 100m users by the end of its second month, which prompted Big Tech to take notice.
Microsoft – a major backer of OpenAI and contributor to ChatGPT’s development – went all in with an AI focus and began integrating the capabilities of OpenAI’s technology into its various services.
Initial successes – such as a significant boost to the number of Bing users after it integrated AI features – led to responses by Google and other tech companies. It also gained the attention of regulators, with the EU’s AI Act being quickly updated before its launch to include a focus on generative AI technology.
One year since ChatGPT’s launch and the AI sector has been transformed, with AI being pushed into virtually every sector. But – like many forms of new technology – this change has had a mix of benefits and negative impacts.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the biggest impacts ChatGPT has had in the tech world.
The good
Dr Marc Warner is the CEO of Faculty, which aims to help companies use “safe human-led AI”. He said the average consumer had “no idea” what generative AI was one year ago and that this sector has grown to become “goldmine for businesses”.
“Businesses have been able to implement and train chatbots using large language models (LLM) enabling employees to spend more time on business strategy and other important areas of work while improving customer satisfaction,” Warner said.
The amount of attention focused on this field has also created a highly competitive landscape, which is beneficial in terms of creating more advanced services for consumers. Companies such as Google, IBM and Amazon have released their own forms of AI chatbots for both consumers and enterprises, while start-ups have gained traction over the past year to challenge the dominance of ChatGPT.
Despite this, it appears the OpenAI chatbot has remained on top. An analysis of 50 AI chatbots between September 2022 to August 2023 found that ChatGPT received 14bn visits – more than 60pc of the analysed traffic – despite not being launched until the end of November 2022.
But this surge has still been beneficial for competitors, as the overall traffic of these 50 chatbots experienced a massive growth across the board.
Warner also noted that ChatGPT and the overall advances in generative AI have “paved the way for genuine, life-saving use cases”. Various experts have discussed the benefits AI can bring to important sectors such as research and healthcare.
“Working with Faculty, NHS England has used generative AI to generate ‘synthetic’ patient records based on real conditions,” Warner said. “This has allowed the NHS to test the impact of potential treatments without breaching privacy laws.”
Workplaces have also seen transformations as a result of generative AI. A recent survey commissioned by Betterworks looked at more than 1,000 employees in the US and found that more than half are using generative AI at work for complex activities. These employees also agreed with the argument that AI could reduce bias across a variety of HR processes.
The bad
But while AI holds a lot of potential for how it can benefit humanity, there have been various concerns raised about how AI can be misused.
Cybersecurity concerns were raised following the rise of ChatGPT, with hacker forums sharing examples of developing malware with the help of the chatbot. OpenAI has updated the model multiple times to prevent this type of misuse, but criminals adapted and shared their own forms of generative AI chatbots that lack ethical restrictions.
Other issues come from the chatbots themselves, as the technology is still developing. Various examples have sprouted up this year of chatbots like ChatGPT containing biases in their responses and being prone to ‘hallucinations’ – which is when the chatbot makes an error.
The ugly
There are issues with AI that could arguably be resolved as the technology becomes more advanced, but this isn’t true in every case. For example, issues of misinformation being spread by generative AI systems appears to be much harder to counter – and may become a more serious problem as these systems evolve.
One of the biggest examples of this has been on social media, where generative AI systems have been used to spread various forms of false information, such as a fake attack on the Pentagon in the US.
Meanwhile, workers are concerned about the risk of job losses as AI technology develops. A Goldman Sachs report earlier this year suggested that generative AI products such as ChatGPT could cause “significant disruption” to the labour market and replace 300m jobs worldwide in the future.
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