In the previous months, ChatGPT has become one of the talking points of the global conversation, leading the pack for the current hot topics in the tech industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a text-based generative artificial intelligence tool which falls under the Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) category. The AI tool was built with the ambition of enabling abilities such as translating, detecting patterns, and answering questions, similar to the text-predicting system found in modern mobile phones. With this step forward in AI technology, businesses and researchers have asked the valid but concerning question; will AI take away our jobs? Big corporations such as Expedia and Spotify have already committed to integrating a variation of OpenAI technology into their platforms.
However, the AI industry is not without flaws, reports such as the one issued by Goldman Sachs researchers have estimated that AI automation can take away more than three hundred million jobs. One of the potential problems with AI tools as such is the amount of bias and misinformation due to the lack of incorporating common sense; meaning that a tool may not understand the text it is producing and rather outright produce an answer or suggestion defining probabilities and statistics. Dr. Watson, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge commented about this matter: “We’re very attracted by the prospect of something acting as a source of ultimate intelligence and informational knowledge, but this is not a trustworthy, independent source of information.”
Apart from the lack of common sense, AI technologies bring with them issues surrounding privacy and control in terms of the wrong information that can be fed to the users. Being mindful of these issues, the Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali) blocked ChatGPT in Italy and forced OpenAI to stop providing the service until a number of regulations were met, showing the concerned governments have around AI technology. When it comes to developing countries such as Cambodia, the integration of AI technologies into their learning processes brings up questions regarding the implementation of plagiarism detectors, which can be difficult to access due to its cost.
Educators, learners, and leaders must cooperate in finding a way to embrace AI technology, taking into consideration the advantages it brings with it developing the skills required to understand and apply regulations and privacy to the solutions provided. UNESCO has mentioned that: “Education systems must reform themselves much faster and more continuously,” implying that with the current speed of technological advancements, the learning processes should keep up with the times.
OpenAI is a research lab founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and several other engineers with expertise and experience in AI fields. OpenAI has a business subsidiary enabled to sign commercial agreements, the renewal of which was done under a bigger financial plan in the year 2023. As of yet, the solutions provided by Open AI include ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Bedrock from Amazon, all leading the Generative AI stream with the ambition of revolutionizing and taking the digital world to the next level.
