ChatGPT Will Change Content Creation for Good

There are few recent technologies that have garnered the attention of generative AI.  According to tech investor Sequoia Capital, “Generative AI is well on the way to becoming not just faster and cheaper, but better in some cases than what humans create by hand.”

Whether it’s being used for artwork, writing, or voice augmentation, the applications of generative AI are expanding beyond ‘just for fun’ to delivering real business value. We’re already seeing it take hold across industries. And it’s only the beginning of what is sure to be an exciting but challenging next generation of AI software and solutions. 

Big Tech Betting Big on ChatGPT

We can’t talk about generative AI without mentioning ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot that can do everything from writing code to answering questions. Microsoft recently announced its plans to invest $10B in OpenAI, experimenting with building new text-generating GPT features into its Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook apps. This integration could aid with everything from AI writing emails to replacing stock images in your PPT slides. 

Beyond cool new capabilities, this news is profoundly important. For starters, the proliferation of generative AI will impact any job that relies on human expertise and communication. In short, there are a few areas that won’t evolve. From education and law to finance and media, in many fields, humans stand to be augmented or replaced by computer-aided tools.

While it’s early days for robots to replace humans, this shift will bring accuracy and privacy concerns to the forefront of a technology that has been otherwise unregulated. Disputes around ownership and privacy of training data will need to be addressed, and although quite convincing in most cases, claims produced by ChatGPT will need to be validated by humans for the foreseeable future. 

The good news is Microsoft has a good reputation as an ethical steward of challenging new technology. It's not trying to sell adverts or use AI to surveil its users. Better Microsoft than Meta or other organizations whose businesses depend on surveillance to thrive. Addressing these privacy and accuracy concerns can benefit us all. And the automatic email responses aren’t so bad, either. 

What Businesses Should Know About ChatGPT

Most businesses aren’t Microsoft—but many smaller enterprises are already using ChatGPT for mundane, day-to-day tasks. Especially in the area of non-face-to-face business communication. Being the founder of a global business that partners with companies everywhere, from the US to APAC regions, ChatGPT has been an incredibly valuable tool for writing emails that convey the appropriate meaning to the recipient, regardless of language or cultural nuances. 

While ChatGPT is heavily text-focused, and at the moment, most businesses are leveraging those capabilities, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Powerful speech and video products are also becoming available. Think of voice translation in real-time or being able to say a command in natural language resulting in a multimedia asset without using multiple apps and editing tools. The applications are endless. 

One particularly bright spot is speech-to-speech (S2S) technology. For fields like customer service, this is a game-changer. For example, contact center agents can use voice assistive tools in real-time to clearly understand callers from anywhere in the world, helping them resolve problems faster and feel more empowered. This can also open new revenue streams for businesses, widening the talent pool and stimulating the economy in remote areas. 

S2S has massive potential in gaming, the Metaverse, and beyond, too. For example, a user can opt to sound like their on-screen character. In a more unfortunate example, a woman can change her voice to sound like a man to protect her identity in the gaming arena, one with well-reported incidents of sexism and gender bias. Not a solution to the problem but a short-term tool that can be used to promote safety and well-being. 

Developments like this will make it easier for people around the world to understand each other and find information by removing communication barriers. The technology can figure out the key essence of what a person is trying to say and deliver it in a way that is best suited to the recipient. It will be exciting to see how this grows in the consumer and enterprise markets alike over the next few years. 

With Potential Comes Pitfalls

Like all technology, ChatGPT can be regarded as good or bad, depending on your perspective. Disruption can be hard, and although there is great promise with generative AI, there are also growing concerns that will need to be handled with urgency and care. 

1. Job Losses: As a result of innovation in this area, there will be jobs that no longer exist or are drastically changed. It’s almost like comparing someone writing an encyclopedia to a simple Google on the device in your pocket—within a year. Do you still need a lawyer to write a verbose document, or can it be generated from a list of key terms? In education, it will become harder for teachers to decipher whether students have actually grasped a lesson or edited content created by AI. 

Some of the top ethical concerns to consider include: 

2. Learning: You read countless books at school. Those books trained you how to write, yet what you write is yours. ChatGPT has read everything, and it can write whatever you want, but you and your ideas are fundamental to its ability to do that effectively. Humans and their ideas still determine value. However, as AI becomes more sophisticated and accurate, we must stay vigilant about how this will shape crucial cognitive functions like critical thinking and literacy.  

3. Intellectual Ownership: Debates over copyright and ownership of training data will take time to settle, and there will undoubtedly be losers. Overall though, the potential for good, delivering benefits to billions who have poor economic opportunities today, far outweighs the negative consequences to a vastly smaller number of people. That said, we do need systems in place to credit and compensate creators for their work, and we’re already behind here. 

4. Availability of Training Data: Generative AI generates new content per interaction based on the distillation of a vast training dataset. For example, an AI model trained on a massive number of shipping contracts can understand the important aspects of said contract and generate a new one. But the application domains are limited by the availability of robust training data. For now, this will heighten the barriers to entry for certain industries and groups.

ChatGPT can empower billions of people to better understand each other and communicate efficiently and cheaply. That’s a huge win. Of course, there are some who won’t like this, starting with people whose livelihoods are disrupted. But let’s not forget—this isn’t about evil tech overlords. It’s about progress, and it can broaden access, training, and education to groups previously excluded. It’s a two-way street.

As Nobel prize winner and human judgment expert Daniel Kahneman puts it, “Clearly, AI is going to win. How people adjust is a fascinating problem.” No doubt there will be growing pains, but if done right, generative AI can change our work and our world for the better—with humans being a necessary part of both.