Lately, ChatGPT, an OpenAI chatbot, has been all the rage. As the epitome of publicly available artificial intelligence, it’s ready to fix a software engineer’s coding issues, pass a US medical license, write the latest hit song, and be there for anyone who’d rather talk to a robot than a human… which turns out to be a lot of people. OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company, formerly owned by tech giant Elon Musk, developed the chatbot to be a free and widely-accessible resource. ChatGPT employs the GPT-3 large language model (LLM), which is programmed to understand human language and vernacular and generates responses based on substantial amounts of data. 

“AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people,” says Musk. 

Further, Musk warns that artificial intelligence could be more lethal than a nuclear weapon. ChatGPT remains unregulated, and nothing controls its development. In the world of artificial intelligence, professionals and politicians alike agree that keeping it under control is a good idea.

Today, OpenAI is making inroads into the legal sector. HarveyAI, an artificial intelligence startup funded by OpenAI, partnered with Allen & Overy, one of the world’s largest law firms. In the last year, HarveyAI received a $5 million investment from the ChatGPT creators. HarveyAI is a chatbot specifically designed for legal matters, saving time and providing a competitive advantage to its users. According to founder Gabriel Pereyra, a former research scientist at DeepMind Technologies Ltd., the AI is beginning to work with other large law firms to develop custom tools. 

“…I think that if AI really truly fully happens, I can imagine all these ways that it breaks capitalism,” said Sam Altman, owner of OpenAI, in an early 2023 interview with Forbes journalist Greg Brockman. 

But what does the public have to say? 

“It’s impressive how ChatGPT can generate plausible prose, relevant and well-structured, without any understanding of the world — without overt goals, explicitly represented facts, or the other things we might have thought were necessary to generate intelligent-sounding prose,” says the Harvard Gazette’s Steven Pinker.

Though seemingly the harbinger of modern artificial intelligence, ChatGPT is infamously imperfect. Its creative spread of misinformation and lack of emotional intelligence prove that its algorithm has a long way to go. However, the field is terrifyingly large, and ChatGPT has some competitors. Google’s Bard chatbot has been growing in popularity, but it is not nearly as comprehensive. Of course, other bots, such as the Quillbot paraphrasing tool, can be used to circumvent the system. 

ChatGPT is an evolving algorithm. For the algorithm to continue to gain accuracy, humans must be more predictable. Yet we aren’t, and within our humanity lies our safety net against rising artificial intelligence.

Edited by Eleanor Knight