ChatGPT needs no introduction. This incredible AI-powered chatbot is designed to use natural language processing to answer questions like a knowledgeable human being would. Due to its impressive abilities, ChatGPT could be considered an AI game changer as it can interpret concepts, understand language nuance, and provide answers in a detailed manner.
A sibling model to InstructGPT, ChatGPT allows users to have human-like conversations with the chatbot. Internet users worldwide have found ChatGPT to be an effective tool to answer their questions and help them with tasks such as composing emails, preparing essays, articles, blog posts, and even coding processes.
The humongous success of ChatGPT forced many companies to release their own versions of AI chatbots, such as Google Bard, Zapier AI Chatbot, Microsoft Bing AI, Chatspot, and more.
This remarkable, path-breaking technology has managed to bring about a new paradigm in how users can interact with technology. Many businesses have started using ChatGPT for writing their marketing, sales, and ad copy. Customer service chatbots have revolutionized customer service by allowing businesses to interact with their customers like never before, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
ChatGPT has managed to transform the current digital landscape; however, it has been marred by controversies. Our blog post will explain some of the limitations of ChatGPT and illuminate the controversies surrounding it – so that you can understand if ChatGPT is worth using for your business, too.
The Top 5 Problems with OpenAI’s ChatGPT
ChatGPT is simple to use and has the power to transform our future; however, thinking that it’s all upside and no downside is a misconception. There are several reasons why we need to be concerned about ChatGPT. Here are some of them.
#1. Security, Ethical, and Privacy Concerns
Here is example #1, below — Seriously, do you want this info out there?
First and foremost, there is no way to check how much information ChatGPT has collected about you from when you created your account. Isn’t this scary? It’s especially concerning because the scale and scope of the data and storage required by ChatGPT are much higher than other technologies.
The AI-powered chatbot has received heavy criticism from users, privacy experts, and government agencies about its data retention policies. ChatGPT gathers user details from three sources (at three different stages).
- When users sign up or pay for a premium plan, they must enter their account information. This is the first source through which ChatGPT gathers information.
- The information that users type into the chatbot is the other source of data collection.
- Finally, ChatGPT tries to identify the data it pulls from your device or browser, such as the IP address and location.
Data collected from your conversations with ChatGPT is the most worrying factor. Along with your IP address and location, other personal details such as browser type, the date and time when you started using ChatGPT, and the length of each of your sessions can also be automatically retrieved from your device and browser.
Your browsing activity also gets tracked by OpenAI using cookies in the chat window and on its site. Apparently, these details are collected for analysis purposes and to find out how users interact with ChatGPT.
Using ChatGPT to proofread your personal documents can be dangerous because ChatGPT stores transcripts of your conversations and logs any information you put into the chat, including personal information and data points.
Using ChatGPT for your professional work can be even more dangerous if the document you are trying to proofread includes confidential information about your company, clients, or employees. Imagine what could happen if you unknowingly give your client’s contact details. It could land you in trouble — if not legally, certainly with your client.
There were some instances in the recent past when some users were able to see chat heads (conversation headings) in the sidebar that didn’t belong to them. This happened due to a security flaw on ChatGPT. Sharing users’ chat histories due to a security breach is a serious concern, especially because of the enormous number of users using this chatbot – more than 100 million monthly active users.
#2. Generating Incorrect Answers
While AI assistants like Alexa or Siri use the internet to locate the answer to the specified question, ChatGPT works differently. It works on a model where it constructs a sentence word by word and generates a reply that could be the most likely answer to the question. In a nutshell, it gives an answer based on guesswork, and in all likelihood, the answer may not be entirely relevant for the question or could be completely wrong.
If you think this happens only for complicated questions, you are wrong. ChatGPT could fail at a simple mathematical calculation and even generate a wrong answer for a simple logical question. The funny thing is that it can argue wrong answers with so much conviction that it sounds believable and true.
ChatGPT supporters have been arguing that it generates wrong answers because the users are not being specific, their prompts are either ambiguous or very short, the question does not have a proper context, and so on. They even suggest that users need to have a back-and-forth conversation to get an ideal response.
While some of these arguments do make sense, you can’t help but wonder why it is so tricky and challenging to get the right answers from an AI that supposedly knows so much.
We can agree that when it comes to some complicated queries, users should provide detailed and specific prompts while avoiding vague or ambiguous prompts. But do they really need to do this for some basic logical questions too? Haven’t there been instances when ChatGPT struggled with basic fundamental math and was also not able to comprehend simple, straightforward reasoning?
#3. Being Biased
It can be surprising to know that an AI tool can be biased like most human beings. But, don’t forget that an AI tool like ChatGPT, or any technology for that matter, is designed by humans. Purely on an emotional level, this is one of the most worrying issues of ChatGPT, as it can generate controversial or upsetting answers that discriminate against race, gender, age groups, and minority groups.
What is the root cause of this issue? Well, this AI tool was designed in such a way that it uses past data and considers it as an important criterion to arrive at a decision for the question asked or task assigned to it. The problem is that what was considered right or normal in the past could be completely unacceptable or ethically wrong in the present.
Many companies use ChatGPT to review the resumes they receive from job applicants. The major issue is that the AI tool uses a linguistic pattern from past resumes to analyze the resumes of the current candidates to identify the ideal candidates.
How is this a problem? In the past, women were underrepresented, and there used to be gender bias in the workplace, and more importance was given to male candidates during interview sessions. ChatGPT will follow the same model while screening current candidates, resulting in a hiring program that could be inadvertently biased toward male candidates. Many companies have faced this issue, including the tech giant Amazon.
It’s not only gender bias, ChatGPT has also been criticized and accused of being politically biased against groups like senior citizens and people who are differently abled.
#4. Creating a Negative Impact on the Education Sector
ChatGPT can help school students with any task involving brainstorming and summarizing, thereby helping them complete their assignments, whether it’s an English essay writing assignment or something else. However, it’s not just assignments; students have also started using AI to assist them with their online exams. This has forced education management authorities to rewrite courses and make changes to their curriculum to stay one step ahead of the students who are using AI in an unethical manner.
ChatGPT can be helpful to students in some ways; however, its cons overshadow its pros. One of the significant impacts of ChatGPT is that it can affect the creativity of students. Frequent use of the AI chatbot can lead to a lack of creativity and self-involved ideas.
It can also lead to a lack of emotional intelligence in students because the AI chatbot lacks empathy and human instincts in its functions. Even though it is designed to have a human-like behavior, it is nowhere close to achieving that because of the mechanical and machine-like answer it generates and also because of flaws like the ones that we have covered in this post.
We can strongly suggest that school authorities and educators need to ensure that students don’t become dependent on ChatGPT for their assignments and other tasks. We can also say that this is very important to ensure their creativity is not affected. But will they be required to use their creativity in the future?
There are already discussions about the possibility of ChatGPT replacing humans in the workplace. So, will students really need to learn to write — and develop and hone their skills for their future professional endeavors, considering that ChatGPT could reduce or completely eliminate their need in the workplace?
#5. Replacing Humans in the Workplace
If a company can get relevant content for its website from ChatGPT, it is unnecessary to hire a content writer. Similarly, ChatGPT can handle many other areas, including proofreading, email marketing, social media management, translation, customer service, news reporting, recruiting, technical support analysis, and so on.
If a company can complete all these tasks using an AI chatbot, it can avoid hiring multiple people for each role. This way, the company can save a lot of money by avoiding salaries, increments, insurance, and so on. We can argue that technological advancements in the past have also resulted in jobs being lost in large numbers. Still, ultimately, it was for the larger good as such technological advancements have helped mankind in several ways.
Remember, change is the only constant, and you should embrace it. So, technological advancement isn’t the issue here. It is the speed at which AI advancement is taking place, causing multiple industries to face various changes rapidly all at once.
Are Our Apprehensions about ChatGPT Right or Wrong?
ChatGPT is far from perfect, as it still requires human intervention – to provide input and review the output, considering its flaws. Be it school assignments, an article about a product or service, or something else, it requires humans to review and edit the content before it can be submitted or published. So, it is nowhere close to replacing humans in any field as it requires human assistance to fine-tune its output.
Companies could use ChatGPT to replace specific job roles; however, if you are worried about mass layoffs, it is unlikely to happen as the AI chatbot cannot be used by companies to replace job roles that require human qualities such as critical thinking, innovation, emotions, empathy, and creativity. This illuminates an important point – the importance of upskilling and upgrading in today’s competitive world. As long as you are constantly working on upgrading your skills, you will not just be able to sustain but also thrive.
Featured Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Pexels; Thank you!
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