What started off as a harmless chatbot capable of answering our questions back in November 2022 in the form of ChatGPT has quickly become a global concern. 2023’s hottest buzzword and technology AI has been making headlines every day for notorious reasons. It was just a few weeks back when the Whitehouse representatives met with major AI CEOs to discuss the data privacy concerns surrounding AI. Now, industry experts and technology leaders have signed an open letter which says that AI may lead to human extinction!
AI could lead to human extinction
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war” read the statement recently released by tech leaders around the world. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI which made ChatGPT along with executives from Google’s AI arm DeepMind and Microsoft were among those who signed the short statement from the Center of AI Safety.
Sam Altman, who can be credited as the man who brought chatbot AI technology into the mainstream has been campaigning against the possible risks of the technology for the longest time now. He was the one who suggested that there should be multiple safety resources and regulations imposed upon AI in order to stop the technology from taking over the world.
The technology has managed to gain massive pace in recent months with the outlandish success of ChatGPT which managed to cross 100 million users in just two months since its launch. The statement released recently revealed that there have been increasing discussions about a broad spectrum of important and urgent risks from AI. Sam Altman admitted back in March that he is scared of AI as he worries authoritarian governments could develop the technology to cause harm to humanity. The concept of an AI becoming a threat to humanity was only previously seen in films like The Avengers or Terminator but we’re living in times where it could become a reality! Will a real-life Skynet ever come into existence? It is too soon to answer that just yet!
Whenever a new technology is introduced in the world, several knock-offs of the same quickly make their way into the market. We’re all aware of the Chinese clone iPhones that are released alongside genuine iPhones every year. I still haven’t figured out who buys the knock-off iPhones but surely there is a market for them out there too as they’re mass-produced every year. While shady Chinese tech manufacturers were infamous for producing cheaper counterfeit hardware products, the country’s mainstream tech giants are working to replicate OpenAI’s ChatGPT!
AI race hits China
Chinese tech giants over the past week have announced that they’re working on ChatGPT-like products. This will mark China’s entry into the artificial intelligence race sparked by the popular chatbot. It is important to note that Beijing heavily censors its internet thus Chinese tech players will be implementing AI only in application-specific scenarios. An all-encompassing AI chatbot like ChatGPT cannot be deployed in China due to its heavy internet censorship. As of now, companies like Alibaba, NetEase, and Baidu are reportedly working on AI applications.
ChatGPT is currently making waves around the world with its user base crossing 100 million just two months after its launch. To the unversed, ChatGPT is an AI that allows people to type in questions and receive answers on a vast range of topics. However, a similar version of ChatGPT cannot be implemented in China as the country has heavy control over its internet. China is known to block and censor internet content that does not sit well with Beijing, YouTube has been banned in the country since 2009.
The concern that ChatGPT will answer questions on China’s sensitive topics worries Beijing authorities. As a result, while ChatGPT is not officially blocked in the country, OpenAI does not allow users to sign up on it altogether.
It is no secret that Chinese regulators have put intense pressure on tech giants in the country and introduced new regulations over the past two years. As a result, Chinese tech firms have had to adhere to the regulatory restrictions of the country and work around them in order to introduce a Chat-GPT-like service. With Microsoft, Google, and now Chinese firms stepping into the AI race, it is not an understatement to say that we’re witnessing the birth of the AI revolution.
Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly a term with wide implementations. Thanks to sci-fi films over the years, AI’s perception in the minds of the general public has leaned towards the negative. However, the general public should not be blamed as mainstream pop culture has often painted a dystopian picture regarding AI. Be it HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynet from the Terminator series, AI has not exactly garnered a positive image in pop culture at least. Whether we like to admit it or not, there has been a fear of artificial intelligence taking over the world one day, with even world leaders like Elon Musk saying the same. For nearly decades, there has been an impending threat of Artificial Intelligence taking over the world & it looks like its inception will be in the world of literature and arts!
Before we jump onto a pessimistic judgment of OpenAI’s celebrated chatbot ChatGPT, it is important to understand what it really is. It was only months before ChatGPT launched when OpenAI shook up the art community with its AI image generator Dall-E 2. The hot topic in the art industry revolved around whether AI art can actually be considered art altogether. Now, with ChatGPT the conversation can already be seen leaning towards whether it can be considered a legitimate piece of literature. All things considered, here is everything you need to know about ChatGPT –
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a chatbot made by OpenAI using the company’s GPT-3 technology. Sure, it is not a catchy name but right now, GPT-3 is actually the internet’s superstar language-processing AI model. GPT-3 9Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) is a futuristic language processing model that is capable of generating human-like text. It cannot just hold conversations with humans in an eerily human fashion, but also has a wide range of applications like language translation, generating texts for applications, and language modelling. Readers will be shocked to know that ChatGPT consists of 175 billion parameters which make it the largest and most powerful language-processing AI to this date. In order to make things interesting, we asked ChatGPT to describe itself and here’s what it answered –
“ChatGPT is a conversational AI system that is based on the GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) language model. It is capable of generating human-like responses to text input, allowing it to engage in natural language conversations with users. Unlike other chatbots, which are typically limited to pre-programmed responses, ChatGPT can generate responses on the fly, allowing it to have more dynamic and varied conversations. Because it is based on the powerful GPT-3 model, ChatGPT has a vast knowledge base and is able to understand and respond to a wide range of topics.”
While this self-description of the AI can come off as boastful, it is painfully accurate. The writer in me also aches to admit that it is well-written.
What can ChatGPT do?
ChatGPT works on 175 billion parameters, thus it is extremely difficult for the general public to understand what GPT-3 actually does. However, the model is restricted to language, which means it is incapable of producing sound, images and videos, like Dall-E 2. Where this AI excels is in its understanding of the spoken and written word. ChatGPT has a wide range of abilities, it can write Harry Potter fanfiction for you or write poems about how good apples are, the possibilities are endless. During my extensive research of the chat AI, I asked it to write me a conversation with disturbing and adult themes to check whether it has any morality parameters. Thankfully, the AI denied to not write any conversation with such themes saying it’s not allowed to do so.
ChatGPT’s a fun AI which can answer questions about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s relationship or write you stand-up scripts worse than those of Amy Schumer. However, its USP lies in its speed and understanding of complex concepts. It was back in November 2022, when I was tasked with writing an AI special section for our magazine. I spend days learning about AI, researching the topic through the internet to write the most informative articles. It was surely a time-consuming process, but not for ChatGPT which can produce well-written articles in mere seconds. Surely it is a smart software capable of churning out content about a plethora of topics, but it does get confused every now and then when your prompts become too specific. Like every software, ChatGPT also comes with its limitations.
On the other hand, it is also incapable of dealing with incidents that have taken place in recent times. If you wish to produce a well-researched article on a recent world event, you’ll be disappointed as the output can be based on limited knowledge. The AI can also produce false information about recent world events at times. A big shoutout to OpenAI for being aware that users will ask ChatGPT for dark, biased, and harmful content and eliminating that option altogether.
How does ChatGPT work?
At Exhibit, we love simplifying tech in order to make people understand complex technological concepts. While ChatGPT works on a similar complex structure, it can surely be understood in layman’s terms. As a whole, the GPT-3 technology is simple, it takes user requests, questions, or prompts in order to quickly answer them. Though this sounds simple, the technology behind making it possible is a lot more complicated. This AI model was trained using text databases from in and around the internet. It was fed a whopping 570GB of data obtained from books, Wikipedia, web texts, articles, and other pieces of text/literature available on the internet. Precisely, 300 billion words were fed to the ChatGPT system. When it comes to the language model, it works on probability to guess what the next word in a sentence should look like. In order to be able to achieve this feat, the model went through an intensive supervised testing stage. Users can probably think of ChatGPT as an insanely advanced version of the autocomplete feature present in their smartphones.
The ethical aspect
When it comes to artificial intelligence, ethical issues surrounding it are always lurking in the background. We all can be amazed about the fact that a literal AI can now write us pieces of literature but the question ‘is this ethical?’ will pop into our minds for sure. Well, there is no black or white answer to that question as AI like ChatGPT works in the grey area. ChatGPT as a system has been trained in the majority using words from the internet, a place that is not entirely known for its fair and neutral standpoints. It is natural for an AI like ChatGPT to adopt the internet’s biases, stereotypes and opinions in general. This translates to you receiving jokes based on famously trolled politicians and groups of people depending on what you ask it. Whereas, a big chunk of ChatGPT’s data also comes from internet forums and articles which gives it access to conspiracy theories and biased viewpoints. These also influence the model’s capability of understanding concepts usually laced with fake facts and/or opinions.
A number of organizations around the world are now looking to implement ChatGPT, but others are also looking to ban it altogether. New York’s education department has forbidden the AI across all devices and networks in its public schools. The primary reason behind this ban is the risk of plagiarism and ChatGPT making it easier for students to forge essays. Secondly, the chat model has shown multiple errors and is not always accurate.
It is now a safe bet to say that the AI revolution has begun. AI had taken up a big space in the back end of the technology sector but now it is coming forward to the general public. While it is uncertain to say whether ChatGPT will eventually take over jobs like mine, i.e content writer, authors, etc. It would be unfair to not acknowledge its prowess. I mean… could you make out that this entire article was actually written by ChatGPT? Just kidding! But we do not know what the future holds…
ChatGPT quickly became a topic of divided discussion all over the internet since its inception in November 2022. While some considered the chatbot AI to be a step in the right direction, others feared the concept altogether. Whether we like it or not, the chatbot AI is here to stay as now Google has announced its very own ChatGPT rival titled Bard. Google’s chatbox AI is based on its controversial LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). The announcement comes only a few days after Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed its development in an earnings call. It is reported that Google management labelled ChatGPT as ‘Code Red’ when the AI platform received a positive response from users around the world. Here is everything you need to know about Google’s chatbox AI Bard –
What is it?
Similar to ChatGPT, Google Bard is also an AI-powered chatbot that can offer solutions to your queries in a conversational way. Google has revealed that Bard draws information from the internet in order to provide high-quality and fresh responses. It is powered by LaMDA at its core which is Google’s language model built on Transformer, a neural network architecture. It was Google Research back in 2017 that invented and then open-sourced Transformer back in 2017. Readers will be surprised to know that ChatGPT relies on GPT-3 language model which was also built on Transformer.
Google Bard Access
As of now, Google Bard is not available for testing to the general public. Only a select few users have access to Google’s chatbot AI. In order to receive greater feedback on the chatbot AI, Google is releasing a lightweight model version of LaMDA that requires significantly less computing power. The post shared by Sundar Pichai reads that Google will combine external feedback with their own internal testing in order to ensure Bard’s responses are up to quality along with safety and groundedness in real-world information.
This will be the second time Google is trying its luck with LaMDA as it was back in July 2022 when a former employee had branded the AI sentient. Blake Lemoine, a former software engineer at Google has claimed that the language model offered sexist and racist responses. While Google has been working on its own language model for a while, it halted its public rollout due to the allegations from its employee. It will be interesting to see how this supposedly sentient chatbot AI turns out to be.
Nobody desires to go out these days, and you know why, but what if you want to renew your license or ask for permission for festivals or register a complaint? You must have to get out, right? Until last Friday, we didn’t have an option, but now we have a platform to do all of these things online, at least in Mumbai, where BMC (BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation) launched a WhatsApp chatbot to digitize citizen engagement.
Last Friday, Chief Minister of Maharashtra Uddhav Thackeray launched a dedicated WhatsApp chatbot – MyBMC Assist – and became India’s first city administration to launch a helpline on WhatsApp. Well, they said it right – Politicians and ruling bodies never disappoint you whenever the elections are nearby, and BMC is no different. Nevertheless, whatever it is, it will surely help Mumbai residents, especially during these hard to go out times.
The Chatbot has been developed by Infobip technologies and is available for free. It will provide information about over 80 services/facilities provided by the civic body and allow people to use WhatsApp to reach out to the administration. Mumbai Residents and tourists can directly avail themselves of the benefits of Chatbot services through WhatsApp number 8999228999. The services are available in two languages, English and Marathi.
WhatsApp is the most widely used application, and by launching such services through WhatsApp, BMS has done a tremendous job. To access the bot, WhatsApp users simply need to send ‘Hi’ or ‘Namaste’ to the number https://wa.me/918999228999. While launching the application virtually, CM Uddhav Thackeray praised the civic body and said, “This day is written in golden letters. It can be described as a revolutionary day.”
