What do the steam engine, electricity generator, internal combustion engine, computers, and artificial intelligence all have in common? All of these technologies were at the forefront of their respective industrial revolutions. Steam engines, back in the 18th century, completely changed the human landscape. It transformed how humans lived for thousands of years in just a matter of decades. The steam engine was so ahead of its time that it impacted every facet of our daily lives. And now, we are living in the era of the fourth Industrial Revolution, where the internet and artificial intelligence are the drivers of the modern world, just as steam engines completely changed the landscape of human existence back in the 18th century.
Artificial intelligence will have the same effect. And what is a better example of the power of artificial intelligence than chatGPT? So let’s take a look at how this generative artificial intelligence has the power to change our world for the better or for worse.
The rise of generative AI
ChatGPT actually wasn’t the first generative AI to rise to global prominence. In fact, it was OpenAI’s other famous product, DALL·E, a text-to-image generator powered by GPT-3, the same language model that powers chatGPT. When it came out last year, it was truly something out of a science fiction movie. People could input simple sentences, and this model could generate complex art. For the first time ever, we saw the true power of generative AI. Before DALL·E, there wasn’t really anything comparable happening in the tech world of this scale.
The Limelight wouldn’t stay with DALL·E for too long, as in just a few months, we got our first taste of chatGPT. Even though it was introduced as a chatbot, it blew up around the world for how powerful it was. It could create original poems, write haikus, and even short stories just from a simple prompt. No one had ever seen a tool so powerful. Soon, everyone was using chatGPT, and in just two months, chatGPT had reached 100 million monthly active users. This level of popularity was unprecedented in the tech space. In comparison, it took Instagram about two and a half years to reach the same amount of monthly active users.
The Good
Education: Education was one of the first use cases people figured out for chatGPT. With its advanced natural language processing capabilities, chatGPT can act as a virtual tutor, answering students’ questions, providing explanations, and offering guidance in real time. It can even adapt to individual learning styles and pace, ensuring that students receive tailored support and assistance. Additionally, chatGPT can facilitate collaborative learning by engaging students in interactive discussions and group activities. It can also assist teachers by automating administrative tasks such as grading and lesson planning, allowing them to focus more on student engagement and instruction.
Healthcare: Healthcare is another industry that will take massive advantage of chatGPT. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a rise in the use of telemedicine as quarantine meant that people couldn’t go out for less serious health-related issues. There are already companies looking to get into the telemedicine space and plan to use chatGPT instead of humans to communicate with patients and diagnose them. The fact of the matter is that healthcare workers are already stretched thin as it is, so there is room for AI-powered telemedicine to help deal with patients that are facing less serious health issues. Doctors and medical researchers also have plans to use chatGPT as an assistant. Just imagine, instead of reading through dozens of books or scrolling through hundreds of papers, doctors could use chatGPT trained in medical literature to answer specific queries. ChatGPT would act like a force multiplier for healthcare workers, allowing them to treat their patients more efficiently. Patient monitoring is another dimension of healthcare that chatGPT would be useful for. Imagine a personal doctor in your phone that has access to your vitals and acts as an early warning system for your health. All of that is within grasp because of chatGPT.
The Creative Arts Industry: The creative arts industry is still in shock at the capabilities of generative AI. While there still are some genuine concerns about the misuse of generative AI, it’s not all bad. We’re already seeing tools and applications pop up that are less about replacing people in the creative arts industry and more about assisting them in their jobs. Photoshop has introduced features that use powerful generative AI to help artists fill in the gaps or enhance their images. 3D applications like Blender have incorporated generative AI to automate mundane tasks, saving artists valuable time that they can use to focus on more creative tasks. Even for writers, chatGPT has become more of an aid than a replacement. It can help them research topics, make summaries, and change the tone of a passage within seconds.
AI-Powered Search Engines: Microsoft’s acquisition of OpenAI had one huge benefit. Microsoft integrated chatGPT with the Bing search engine. So now, when you search on Bing, you not only get the search results like a regular search engine, but you also get direct responses to your questions. The search engine AI is powered by GPT-4, the latest language model by OpenAI. The future of search engines can’t be without AI. It is just too convenient to ignore. Imagine, instead of clicking through website after website trying to find an answer, your search engine finds the answer for you. This is what integrating search engine with chatGPT means, and it’s already happening. You can even try it for yourself by opening Microsoft Edge and using Bing to search.
The Bad and The Ugly
While the excitement around chatGPT and generative AI is at an all-time high, many are concerned with its capabilities. Some believe that chatGPT and similar generative AI tools will increase things like academic dishonesty. There are even fears of chatGPT being used to create mass misinformation campaigns. Then you also have the artists and other creative workers that claim that generative AI basically copies their work. The work that AI is trained on and regenerates it, despite this, the original creator receives zero compensation. Needless to say, there is a lot of ethical gray area with chatGPT, and we’re slowly figuring it out as time goes on. And let’s not forget that chatGPT has been known to generate completely false data and made-up people and events that don’t exist in real life. This is a phenomenon known as hallucination. At its core, chatGPT is still a language processor. It’s just figuring out what to say next and doesn’t care whether it’s true or not.
We still have a long way to go with chatGPT. It may not seem like it, but as of 2023, chatGPT has been out for less than a year. We are still in the very early phases of a truly powerful technology, and we can only speculate the impact that chatGPT will have on the future.
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