ChatGPT responds to a prompt questioning its own role that is plays as threat to creativity. The usage of the AI program has already been banned from several school districts throughout the country. Photo by Matteo Winandy
By Libby Howell
ChatGPT, the innovative creation of OpenAI, is a double-edged sword.
As a language model, it has expanded our communication capabilities, yet its use has raised ethical concerns as it has the potential to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and blur the lines between human and machine.
“I am always very careful about presenting these things like the death knell of an industry because there are parallels with how human beings do this job and how technology does the job,” Online Editorial Director for D Magazine Matt Goodman said.
ChatGPT is an online AI tool that can create any piece of writing within seconds. It gathers its information from similar pieces of literature and combines them together to create an articulate and understandable piece of writing.
Because ChatGPT gathers information and ideas from other literature pieces, it is believed that usage of the chatbot could cause plagiarism within news stories.
Goodman believes that because journalism as a career promotes authenticity and original ideas, the usage of AI would violate the basic principles of journalism.
“You want to avoid plagiarism and if you use [ChatGPT] and it happens to plagiarize something from someone else, then that is a violation of your agreement to your reader, your publication and your occupation,” he said.
One of the biggest concerns is how human-like ChatGPT can make the things it writes sound. For example, some may not have realized that the introduction to this story was written by ChatGPT.
“I would not trust an AI-powered chatbot to produce a new story,” Goodman said. “I don’t think it is ethical and I think it gathers information from places that I have no control over, so I’m unable to confirm whether or not things are true.”
Though most of ChatGPT’s problems are fixable with a degree of human intervention, the AI also has a terrible tendency to let racist or immoral sentences through, which it was designed to avoid.
“Then there are the anecdotes of people using it and it turns [racist or] fascist and [they are] like where is it getting its information from?” Goodman said.
This is concerning not only because it demonstrates that AI can be used to spread hate, but also because it shows that ChatGPT is able to learn to avoid the very parameters it was trained on.
Another major problem is that ChatGPT’s website has a tendency to fluctuate between being shut down due to high demand and giving speedy responses.
“But it is really hard to use because it is constantly shut down or it will take a long time to load because so many people are using it,” sophomore Riley Surgent said.
However, ChatGPT has come out with an upgrade to the website in which you can pay monthly to get quicker service and priority to features and improvements to the website. This optional upgrade will appeal to avid users, but also shows a potential future of chatbots in which simply using them will cost money.
Despite all of the negatives surrounding ChatGPT, it can be used as a tool to aid authors, writers, students and teachers. Because ChatGPT creates pieces of writing so quickly, it can easily help someone get work done more efficiently and eloquently.
“Personally, I think that the advantages are getting work done efficiently, better wording throughout the writing and it can help you write a good essay,” senior Ella Scott Singleton said.
But because it’s such an efficient tool, Singleton worries that students and workers will rely on ChatGPT too much.
“If we all are constantly making AI do things for us, then our ability to be creative has the potential to degrade,” she said.
In addition, with the potential of a recession, many Americans are beginning to worry about the potential of ChatGPT and other AI’s replacing and reducing job opportunities given to the working class.
“Why would you spend time doing a job when AI can do it and maybe one day do it better?” Surgent said.
If AI and other advanced technologies are the future, then Goodman believes we need to figure out the best ways to incorporate them within the workplace.
“More realistically it is a new tool, and if companies are smart and ethical with it, it is more of, ‘how do we use this to improve what we do, and supplement us in saving time and things like that’,” he said. “Instead of ‘this is going to replace my editor two seats down.’”