It’s official. 2023 is the year of AI. ChatGPT, Bard, Autopilot, and others have changed the game of content, writing, coding, graphic artwork, research, and more; and is speculated to have an impact on jobs. Indeed, the ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quit Google due to its possible impacts.
“According to Next Move Strategy Consulting the market for artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to show strong growth in the coming decade. Its value of nearly 100 billion U.S. dollars is expected to grow twenty-fold by 2030, up to nearly two trillion U.S. dollars”
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1365145/artificial-intelligence-market-size/
Having used only the free version of ChatGPT myself, I’ve found the tools to be very useful in researching ideas, writing and it certainly has uses. Bard, although I’ve heard it isn’t as restrictive as ChatGPT, I found to be quite woeful in its accuracy.
For example, I was undertaking research about the early railway development in the North East of England and wanted some information about newspaper headlines and consulted Bard; it told me that was there no newspapers published in that time, but I knew that they did. When I further enquired about the actual newspaper and when it was first published; Bard told me, the result of which completely contradicted what it said in a previous answer!
The net result of this is that results, should be checked. You may wish it to consolidate academic research and summarise the reading, but you should check that its not only reading the correct papers, but that its actually making a summarised assessment.
Inaccuracies, false data, mis-information, algorithms are perhaps the least of the issue; the impact it is already having on jobs will no doubt continue for the years to come.
Some organisations may try to ban the bots, crawlers or signatures from such programs, and there may be other tools that try to identify whether an item is AI or not; thus, it will be interesting in the years to come whether AI will be “regulated”, though what that term actually means in real-terms is anyone’s guess.
I do think new economies will be created out of AI. I’m also interested to see what, if any, push back from consumers will be – will they reject artwork created by AI, will they care? Will they pick and choose companies that have human interaction, people at the helm; or will they always pick cost?