Causes.com
| 4.11.23
Italy Bans ChatGPT, Raising Concerns About AI Writing Tools
ChatGPT: A boon or a bane for society?
What's the story
- Italy has become the first Western country to block ChatGPT, an advanced chatbot created by U.S. start-up OpenAI.
- The Italian Data Protection Authority announced an immediate ban on OpenAI, citing privacy concerns. These include the mass collection and storage of personal data to train the platform's algorithms and the lack of an age verification system.
- An investigation is underway to determine its compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which governs personal data usage, processing, and storage in Europe.
History of artificial intelligence writing programs
- One of the first AI writing programs, SHRDLU, was developed in the late 1960s by Terry Winograd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. SHRDLU was an interactive natural language system that understands and responds to human language input.
- In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers developed expert systems to imitate human decision-making processes in medical diagnosis and financial analysis.
- In the 1990s and 2000s, statistical natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning were developed to train models on large text datasets, leading to chatbots and virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa.
- Language models like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) have expanded to generate appropriate and coherent responses to text input.
- Overall, the history of AI writing programs has shifted towards more organic and natural interactions between humans and machines.
Arguments for artificial intelligence writing programs
- Supporters of AI say it is a helpful time-saving tool, pointing to how quickly it generates various forms of content and provides immediate answers. AI can automate and speed up processes in the workplace, improve efficiency, and assist with decision-making.
- Additionally, AI can be a cost-effective solution for small businesses that cannot afford professional writers.
Arguments against artificial intelligence writing programs
- Opposers point to AI's boundaries in knowledge and its likelihood to contain bias. Since AI is trained on data and algorithms, there is a limit to its ability to handle subjective gray areas and to work around the potential prejudices of its creators.
- AI may also struggle to verify third-party information and understand current events or developments in contemporary fields.
- Some also say AI programs can hamper human creativity by making solutions too easily accessible. Many workers whose jobs revolve around content creation fear a growing dependence on AI may lead to their replacement and even a gradual loss of human intelligence and abilities.
What do you think? Is ChatGPT a boon or bane for our society?
-Laura Woods
(Photo credit: Pexels)
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Countries have a right to determine the privacy, safety & national security requirements for their countries. Tech seems to go off and develop products based n their own requirements and then rush to release them. They don't seem to take into account any country requirements unlike biopharma that has to develop based on country requirements and then get approval to market in that country.
As for ChatGPT, I've used it, and not certain how I would use it. From what I've seen of it's output I'm not sure I would as I prefer to do my own queries, analysis and summaries. Looking at the output I've seen I can't see the sources of the data, how it was analyzed or what the conclusions are. Very high possibility it's misinformation given the amount that exists on the internet that the algorithms access.
I'm not against AI, but I think this product was rolled out too soon and too quickly to be sure it's accurate and can't be used for ill intentions. It seems our society still doesn't have a clear plan for dealing with misinformation, cyberterrorism, and deepfakes, and now we're going to let AI tell us what to write or say without vetting its accuracy?
I think we need an international council of experts from a variety of fields to sit down and define guidelines for where AI can be responsibly used, what is off limits, and who will regulate when there are problems or abuses (there will be).
Italy is making the right decision here, and I hope our leaders will follow suit.
I, and most tech leaders who don't have a dog in this hunt, all believe it was rolled out too soon.
And to a point mostly I'm against ai. Personally, I'm against all of it. It's a genie one can't put back in the bottle. If it's allowed to exist, the most important part to be built in are the guardrails, but even then I don't think humans can anticipate everything a computer does. Humans are fallible, ai learning from itself will not be. And it's learning from itself, in a very short time it will be able to out think humans. There has been news stories that tech engineers have already seen them become sentient. There's no upside to this "shiny new toy" people find entertaining.