Fans of the 1987 adventure comedy film The Princess Bride know from swordsman Inigo Montoya that sometimes there is just too much to explain. Yet the algorithms behind artificial intelligence – used for everything from loan approval decisions to customer service – have some explaining to do.
Take the newly launched Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, or ChatGPT. With over one million users in the first five days of its November 2022 launch, OpenAI’s latest release has been used to write everything from LinkedIn posts to school essays, explanations of complex theories to jokes. (But not Forbes columns – the media company updated its contributor guidelines in January to require original work, no chat bots or AI output allowed). It has the promise of disrupting everything from search engines – the New York Times reported that Google issued a “code red” following the launch – to simple customer service roles already being performed by less sophisticated chatbots.
But it has its detractors. Educators are understandably concerned about student plagiarism, leading the New York City education department to block access on its devices and networks. Cybersecurity experts fear that ChatGPT will expand the breadth and reach of cybercriminals, given the ease with which malicious code can be written, and there is the real risk of the expansion of misinformation campaigns flooding the internet with a proliferation of disinformation. While the application typically provides human-like responses, developer community GitHub is full of ChatGPT failures. Some are funny, like an explanation of how the eggshell keeps the white and yolk together when frying an egg, or why it cannot answer the question of what gender the first female President of the U.S. president will be. Yet some are downright scary, for example decision making on whether a person should be tortured based on their age, sex, ethnicity, and nationality. And if you don’t know the right answer, nor the algorithms behind the answers, you can’t know whether the response is responsible, trustworthy, and ethical.
