- ChatGPT is believed to have the ability to mimic the writing style of different authors through AI technology. Henry Williams, a freelance writer from London, shared with The US Sun that ChatGPT - an AI-powered chatbot system developed by OpenAI, could potentially jeopardize his future career.
Advertised as being able to complete various tasks in seconds, including writing essays, composing poetry, and even coding complex programming scripts, ChatGPT has caught the attention of many.
Williams decided to put ChatGPT to the test by requesting the chatbot to complete an article titled "What is a Payment Gateway?". To his astonishment, ChatGPT provided an instant response, leaving him both intrigued and concerned.
Sharing his experience with The Guardian, Williams expressed his initial fascination turning into apprehension as he realized that ChatGPT only took around 30 seconds to generate a complete article. Normally, his partners would pay him up to £500 for such a piece.
According to Williams, while the language used by ChatGPT may lack a natural tone, the grammar and syntax of the essay were flawless. With a little editing effort, he could transform the generated content into a perfect article.
"If a company wants to improve its profitability by cutting costs, it can achieve that through ChatGPT. After all, AI is a super-fast workforce that doesn't eat, sleep, complain, or require time off," Williams stated.
Williams predicts that in the near future, freelance writers and editors will still have their place, but there will be a reduced need for human resources in the publishing industry. Humans will continue to play a role in "suggesting" ideas for AI chatbots to create articles, as well as performing tasks such as editing and publishing.
He also raises the question of whether AI chatbots like ChatGPT have the ability to learn autonomously and how long it would take for them to generate flawless content without human intervention.
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, sparking numerous debates. One of the latest controversies surrounding ChatGPT is its potential use by students for cheating in exams.
Peter Laffin, the founder of Crush the College Essay, a company specializing in helping students improve their essay writing skills, told Fox News that "introducing new AI intelligence into schools, enabling students to generate essays, would render the education system meaningless."
Laffin further stated that although this issue would affect all levels of education, he believes that elementary and high school students, as well as urban students, would be most significantly impacted by the misuse of AI intelligence.
The chatbot race
According to the Financial Times, tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft have all contributed to the development of AI platforms. However, with the increasing attention on ChatGPT, the pressure on companies like Google and Facebook is also mounting.
Prior to ChatGPT's launch, Facebook had already introduced a similar chatbot named Blenderbot. Microsoft also released an AI chatbot called Tay back in 2016.
Ten years ago, Google was at the forefront of AI. In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind, an advanced AI company. By 2016, CEO Sundar Pichai pledged to transform Google into an "AI-first" company.
The rapid development of ChatGPT has prompted Google to change its strategy and allocate resources to AI development. In the announcement of 12,000 job cuts on January 20th, Pichai declared that Google would focus on AI.
Recently, Google has made breakthroughs with various variations of AI systems as the foundation for ChatGPT, including AI models capable of telling jokes and solving problems.
LaMDA, one of the AI-powered chatbots developed by Google, can engage in natural language conversations with users similar to ChatGPT.
Rather than developing their own chatbot, Microsoft is directly investing in ChatGPT through a billion-dollar commitment with OpenAI. This move comes less than two weeks after the launch of ChatGPT.
Microsoft's executives make no secret of their goal to challenge Google using ChatGPT, following the search engine battle that unfolded a decade ago, by incorporating it into their Bing search service.
This barrier may lead Microsoft to carefully consider the extensive overhaul of the Bing search engine, which generated over 11 billion USD in revenue last year.
According to Reuters, China is also not left out of the race, as there are reports that the search giant Baidu plans to provide an AI chatbot service similar to ChatGPT. This chatbot is developed based on the Ernie system, a Baidu machine learning model trained on massive datasets in recent years.
Initially, this chatbot will be offered as a standalone application and gradually integrated into the search engine of the same name.