Five Ways ChatGPT has Changed the World

Friday - December 8 2023, 22:32 UTC - 11 months ago

ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app in history, and it is transforming the world in terms of AI safety, job security, education, content standards, and art. The impacts are still being felt, and nations are starting to adapt to its presence.

OpenAI's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT was unleashed onto an unsuspecting public exactly one year ago.It quickly became the fastest-growing app ever, in the hands of 100 million users by the end of the second month. Today, it's available to more than a billion people via Microsoft's Bing search, Skype and Snapchat—and OpenAI is predicted to collect more than US$1 billion in annual revenue.

We've never seen a technology roll out so quickly before. It took about a decade or so before most people started using the web. But this time the plumbing was already in place.

As a result, ChatGPT's impact has gone way beyond writing poems about Carol's retirement in the style of Shakespeare. It has given many people a taste of our AI-powered future. Here are five ways this technology has changed the world.

1. AI safety .

ChatGPT forced governments around the world to wise up to the idea that AI poses significant challenges—not just economic challenges, but also societal and existential challenges.

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

Soon after, the United Kingdom held the first-ever intergovernmental AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park—the place where the computer was born in World War II to crack the German Enigma code.

And more recently, the European Union has appeared to be sacrificing its early lead in regulating AI, as it struggled to adapt its AI Act to potential threats posed by frontier models such as ChatGPT.

Although Australia continues to languish towards the back of the pack in terms of regulation and investment, nations around the world are increasingly directing their money, time, and attention towards addressing this issue, which, five years ago, didn't cross most people's minds.

2. Job security .

Before ChatGPT, it was perhaps car workers 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 now also started to worry about their jobs. One recent study of an online job marketplace found earnings for writing and editing jobs have fallen more than 10% since ChatGPT was launched. The gig economy might be the canary in this coal mine.

There's huge uncertainty about whether more jobs get destroyed by AI than created. But one thing is now certain: AI will be hugely disruptive in how we work.

3. Death of the essay .

The education sector reacted with some hostility to ChatGPT's arrival, with many schools and education authorities issuing immediate bans over its use. If ChatGPT can write essays, what will happen to homework? .

Of course, we don't ask people to write essays because there's a shortage of them or even because many jobs require this. We ask them to write essays because it demands research skills, improved communication skills, critical thinking, and domain knowledge. No matter how good our AI chatbot is, it cannot match all of these qualities yet.

But ChatGPT and other AI technologies do present some new opportunities for students. For example, AI technologies have become vital for research projects, providing natural language understanding tools for extracting data from the internet.

4. Higher standards .

We can no longer accept low-quality content. ChatGPT's natural language processing capabilities are getting more powerful every day and it's getting better at understanding the nuances of human language.

This means any content published online—including articles, essays, tweets, and blog posts—will need to be of a higher standard. ChatGPT can easily spot poorly written content; if it can’t understand and make sense of what you’ve written, you won’t get the clicks, likes, or followers you’d like.

5. Advancing culture .

ChatGPT's poetics also played a role in advancing our understanding of what art can be. It showed us that machines can take inspiration from anything, and can create sound, art, and music from data and metadata alone.

In particular, the working of the ChatGPT brain, called a “generative adversarial network” (GAN), is essentially a machine learning technology that works by analyzing existing data and trying to mimic the patterns it finds. It’s like a virtual camera, recording everything it sees as it develops new ideas and creations.