Will AI technology help or harm us?

In a short period of five months, we’ve seen the generative AI technology spurred by OpenAI’s ChatGPT catch on faster than any other technology in this generation.

Its ability to create novel art, music and writing that mimics human creativity based on simple prompts leaves an uncanny feeling that has got many users wanting to explore its capabilities. Heck, there's even an AI 'prompt engineer' job that can pay up to $335,000 a year and doesn't always require a background in tech.

This growing interest has seen several tech companies begin to make billions of dollars worth of investments in developing their own AI technology to rival the industry-leading OpenAI’s.

But, it doesn’t end there.

OpenAI's opening up its API integration to third-party software has sped up the integration of the GPT model into several internet platforms across industries, from automating customer support to generating creative ideas for artists and content creators.

In another milestone, the ChatGPT chatbot recently released GPT-4, a more advanced successor to its predecessor and added web browsing capabilities with new plug-in support giving it access to real-time data from the web and expanding its capabilities.

Amid the rave, many have raised concerns about its impact on both personal and professional livelihoods and ethical concerns about its use for less ideal activities in the hands of bad actors. As we know, deep fakes are already a common thing – some examples are the viral AI-generated image of Pope John Paul III in a puffer coat that took the internet by storm, the AI image of Donald Trump being arrested by police in New York last week, and an entire song written and sung in the voice of a popular music artist, Jay Z.

More than this seemingly harmless use to mimic human abilities, there’s also the ever-menacing question of whether AI technology will take our jobs and a recent study report by Goldman Sachs predicted that generative AI could potentially impact up to 300 million jobs globally. Yikes!

This unbridled proliferation across our everyday life led more than 1,000 tech leaders including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to sign a petition calling for the pause of ‘giant AI experiments’ in response to the release of GPT-4 – something that China would, perhaps, like to see happen, so that its local companies can catch up with the U.S. in this new technology.  

From a legislative point of view, a number of governments have started working to regulate high-risk AI tools and have begun negotiating the passage of sweeping AI rules. In more heavy-handed legislation, the Italian government issued an immediate ban on access to OpenAI's popular artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, citing alleged privacy violations.

As Techloy continues to track the developments in AI technology, we wonder how the tech world, governments, and people can balance the benefits of generative AI technology with the need to protect our values, ethics, and privacy.

H-AI-ppy week-end!

– Emmanuel