ChatGPT - Friend or Foe?

ChatGPT - Friend or For

OpenAI's ChatGPT platform has rapidly become a media sensation due to its 'chat-like' ability to generate human-like text, answer questions, and generate all types of content (think all things from multi-page essays, articles, and recommendations to computer codes, entire website maps, and design briefs.)

In a previous article, we looked at all things ChatGPT, and how the software works. In this blog, we take a look at why, as with any new software or technology, users need to evaluate both its potential capabilities and its potential vulnerabilities.

So is ChatGPT Friend or Foe?

Chat GPT - Your new best friend

What sets ChatGPT apart from simple artificial intelligence chatbots is the way it has been specifically trained to understand the human intent in a question and provide helpful, truthful, and harmless answers. With seemingly limitless opportunities and uses, this new release of software is providing us with a glimpse into 'the future' with can be achieved with Artificial Intelligence.

Here are a few examples of how ChatGPT is being used in real-life applications:

Content Creation: ChatGPT can be used to generate new content, such as news articles, blog posts, and product descriptions, making it useful for a multitude of business departments and publishers.

Language Modelling: ChatGPT can be used to train other models for tasks such as sentiment analysis, language understanding, and named entity recognition.
Automatic Programming: ChatGPT has been used to generate code in various programming languages, for example for data pipeline and data pre-processing.
Personalisation: ChatGPT can be used to generate personalised responses, such as personalised emails, customer service responses, and product recommendations.
Artistic Creation: ChatGPT has been used to generate new music, poetry, and stories, making it useful for creative professionals and hobbyists.
Virtual Assistants: ChatGPT can be used to create virtual assistants that can understand natural language and respond with helpful information or actions.
Chatbots: ChatGPT can be used to create chatbots that can engage in natural, human-like conversations with users.
Language Translation: ChatGPT can be used to create language translation systems that can understand the meaning of text and translate it accurately.
Text Summarisation: ChatGPT can be used to create systems that can summarise long pieces of text into shorter versions, making it easier for people to quickly understand the main points.

These are just a few examples, as the ability of the model continues to evolve and new use cases and applications are being discovered.

All that glitters isn't gold...

While the hype around ChatGPT has been unprecedented, reaching one million users just five days after its release in December 2022, experts warn that the software should be used with caution, with the demo, in particular, featuring a range of serious pitfalls.

Current known weaknesses of ChatGPT include:

Cyber Security Threats: Cybercriminals may use ChatGPT to generate convincing and personalised phishing emails or messages, in order to trick victims into providing personal information or funds. This removes the common 'red flags' such as spelling and grammatical errors that are used to identify malicious emails.
Adverse attacks: ChatGPT systems may be targeted by malicious actors who attempt to manipulate the system's output for their own gain, such as creating fake or biased responses.
Data privacy breaches: ChatGPT systems may collect and store sensitive information, making them vulnerable to hacking and data breaches.
Bias: The training data used to develop language models, such as ChatGPT, can contain biases that are reflected in the model's output. For example, if a dataset used to train a model contains a bias against a certain group of people, the model may generate biased responses when prompted about those people.
Privacy: Using ChatGPT may pose a threat to privacy as it requires access to large amounts of personal data to function effectively. This could potentially put sensitive information at risk of being exposed or misused if not properly secured.
Misinformation: Chat GPT systems may generate false or misleading information, which can be used to spread disinformation or influence public opinion.

Prepare for the worst and hope for the best...

As we have previously discussed, we know that ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence software is already changing the way we work, and has the potential to both improve the digital landscape of our customers, while also creating new security threats to monitor and act on. We will continue to closely monitor these emerging technologies and implement defences as required.

How Diamond IT can help you get the most from your software

Our software development team excel in helping you make the best decisions around technology to support your modern workforce. Our areas of specialty include: