In November the world saw the birth of a new technology that is set to revolutionise the race for artificial intelligence: ChatGPT. In this article we explain why this tool is the beginning of a change and not just the rage of novelty.
This artificial intelligence chatbot, developed by the company OpenAI, is a programme capable of understanding our commands in text form and responding in return. At first glance it looks like a regular Google, but the big difference is that ChatGPT creates its own content, it is an intelligent programme capable of dialogue with highly elaborated responses, a generative AI that has learned automatically from large amounts of data.
What ChatGPT does
With ChatGPT, you can not only “search for information”, or rather “ask it for answers”, but you can also converse.
For example, you can ask it what was the first president of the United States or the first social network, but you can ask it to explain it to you with emoticons and language accessible to a child or an elderly person.
You can even ask for marriage advice or how to deal with a break-up, because this AI has a sense of context and answers you based on everything you have previously talked about, so it “knows you” and knows how to answer you based on the answers it has already given you. ChatGPT will respond to all these questions with its own elaborate answers, as if you were talking to a person. He will not give you back articles or news from the internet for you to draw your own conclusions, he gives you “absolute and natural answers”.
Risks
However, this is precisely where one of the biggest risks lies. This technology is still limited and flawed. The danger, in fact, is that it sometimes answers so emphatically wrong that alarm bells are ringing about what it could mean for fakenews, the era of post-truth and hoaxes.
If it learns from wrong or biased data, the risk of it spreading false answers is high. That is why the human behind the machine, the non-artificial mind that feeds the training of these intelligences, is important. And it is also important to remember that everything you write to ChatGPT is recorded and can be reviewed or used by developers to further train this AI, so sharing personal data or sensitive company data is not the smartest thing to do.
Investing millions of dollars
In any case, this revolution has already been translated into numbers:
Investment in neural networks such as ChatGPT’s has risen from 10 billion to 160 billion between 2013 and 2021.
This tool is therefore only the beginning of a revolution that is set to transform our daily lives, from work to education, art, medicine and engineering. AI is set to reshape the world, but how does it affect us in practice?
Business and employment
The big difference in this revolution is that it no longer only affects, like automation, repetitive jobs or positions with little added value. We are now talking about AI replacing jobs such as engineers writing code, content creators, lawyers or even artists.
This does not mean that these profiles will disappear or that they will be performed entirely by machines, but it is likely that instead of 5 engineers chopping code you will need one that “asks the AI for code”, or that the AI can help you as an assistant in a legal office to review and summarise jurisprudence.
Similarly, it does not mean that musicians and artists will disappear, but it is likely that instead of hiring an illustrator/photographer/designer to create your logo or accompany a news item for your company, you will ask an AI to generate a royalty-free image for you.
Therefore, the labour market will change, reducing some jobs but also creating new ones, as has happened in all revolutions.
Productivity
Both at work and in our personal lives, these AIs can make our daily lives easier. To give just a few examples of what we can ask of them:
- Send emails for us.
- Write a product specification sheet.
- Collect a bibliography of a subject or legislation.
- Summarise any report or document.
- Write code for us, like a Copilot-style assistant.
- Translate any text.
- Format a document.
- Add population columns for each municipality in a table.
- Create any image/icon/illustration for us based on a line of text.
- Compose a song based on any style or composer, royalty free.
- Retouch an image with the indications we give you.
- Adapt a text to make it accessible to the audience/profile we indicate, for example a video script for youtube or tiktok, with jokes adapted to a region or an audience such as teenagers.
Education
One of the areas where the greatest impact is expected is in education, which is going to have to rethink the concept of “homework”, because at all levels of education and especially at university, students are already using ChatGPT to summarise topics, write papers and essays or help pass subjects. There are concerns about the impact on writing and expression skills, as well as critical thinking in a generation that is going to have it “all done” by technologies such as this. On the positive side, it can help bridge the social gap between students who can afford private tutoring and those who can now rely on ChatGPT to summarise and explain concepts. As with everything, it will depend on how we use the technology.
Geopolitics
Everything suggests that the power that leads the IA will have an advantage in geopolitical balances. Not only because of the wealth it will generate in economic investment and technological development, but also because of the power to control new cyber-attacks, the spread of fake news and disinformation or propaganda, especially if these AIs are trained for insidious purposes.
Tools you can already use in your day-to-day life based on AI
- NamingMagic: Find a name and domain name for your company
- LogoAI y ai: Create your logo and brand identity
- Durable: Build your website from scratch, with text and images
- Mokker: Generate professional photos
- Synthesia: Create text-based videos
- Jasper: Generate original articles
- ChatGPT y AICodeReviewer: Generate code for your applications and developments
– Murf: Create voice narrations for videos or translate any text into speech - Ortto y Craftly: Personalise emails and marketing funnels