AI isn’t going away. Instead of dystopian worries, use it to boost prosperity, progress | Opinion
With the invention of ChatGPT and similar tools, science fiction has become science fact. Despite dystopian novels that predict artificial intelligence will lead to human irrelevance and alarmists forecasting massive job cuts and widespread cheating in classrooms, this technology will lead to more prosperity and progress, not less.
Launched in November, Open AI’s ChatGPT gained 100 million users worldwide in two months, faster than any other web application in history. Those who cheered it — and others who feared it — must accept its widespread impact. It suddenly made our world more complex, creating vast opportunities and challenges.
Bain, Buzzfeed, Google, Instacart, Microsoft and many other companies have been steadily reporting their applications of the technology. I argue that it will vastly improve the productivity and effectiveness of business and higher education.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to connect people across language barriers, increasing our productivity by quickly synthesizing information or generating new content at scale. Imagine having a dozen research assistants providing you with timely insights. For now, fact-checking must still be done manually after initial research and document drafting have been completed.
It also democratizes access to knowledge and helps with initial ideation and any type of content creation. The latest version, GPT-4, is capable of drafting lawsuits, passing standardized exams in the top 10% of scores, building websites from sketches and constructing software games in a matter of minutes. It’s already making its way into third-party products.
To be fair, there are serious, legitimate concerns. The initial conversation in higher education focused on how ChatGPT robs students of motivation to write and think for themselves and called for the return of pen-and-paper or oral exams to avoid plagiarism and cheating. Suddenly, tools have become available to students that allow them to respond to assignments with content generated by technology in a manner of minutes.
The problem is not with students’ use of the technology. It’s with faculty’s lack of adaptation to the new reality. We should educate students about proper and improper technology use in our courses, motivate them to use it properly and revise assignments to elevate the challenges presented, not try to police students through AI cheating detection software. The existence of cheating evasion tools, such as QuillBot, cannot be denied.
With the application of ChatGPT and generative AI tools in professions everywhere, prominent university professors contend that the future will belong to those who can master working collaboratively with generative AI. We have entered a new era of human-machine collaboration that has been forecasted for years.
ChatGPT certainly has limitations. It sometimes provides incorrect information. It often incorporates biases in responses, due to the historical training that includes human biases. As with every new technology, we also worry about the impact of the new tools on jobs and job displacement. However, we once needed people to take care of horses. Then, we needed to fix cars with internal combustible engines. Now, we need people to fix electric engines.
Despite the sensational headlines and distrust of the technology, downplaying its potential would be a huge mistake. We have already seen drastic improvements in the reliability of responses in just a few months. The industry is working on new tools to provide transparency to the reasoning behind the responses generated, and the first tools to help eliminate biases have already been previewed.
While the laws have not kept up with the technological developments, we will soon see courts address some of the pressing legal issues. And some regulation will follow, making the tools more acceptable.
Google and Microsoft are introducing generative AI to the office tools we use every day. It will be a part of our reality, whether we like it or not.
Beata M. Jones is a professor of business information systems practice at the TCU Neeley School of Business.
