ChatGPT, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, was introduced to the unsuspecting public exactly one year ago. It quickly became the fastest growing application and reached 100 million users by the end of its second month. Today, Microsoft Bing is available to more than a billion people through search, Skype, and Snapchat, and OpenAI is expected to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

We have never seen technology develop this quickly before. It took about a decade for most people to start using the internet. However, this time the plumbing was already in place.

As a result, ChatGPT’s impact went far beyond Carol’s Shakespearean resignation poems. It has given many people the chance to experience our AI-based future. Here are five ways this technology is changing the world.

1. Security of Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT has made governments around the world realize that AI poses significant challenges, not just economic but also social and life. United States President Joe Biden has moved the United States to the forefront of AI regulation with a presidential executive order that sets new standards for the safety and security of AI. It aims to advance justice and civil rights, as well as foster innovation, competition, and American leadership in artificial intelligence.

Shortly thereafter, the United Kingdom used World War II to break Germany’s Enigma code. He held the first intergovernmental security summit on artificial intelligence at Bletchley Park, where the World War II computer was located.

And more recently, the European Union appears to have sacrificed its early lead in AI regulation in an effort to adapt AI law to the potential threats posed by advanced models like ChatGPT.

Although Australia continues to lag behind in terms of regulation and investment, countries around the world are increasingly directing their money, time and attention to solving this problem that most people would not have considered five years ago.

2. Occupational safety

Before ChatGPT, perhaps the auto industry and other workers feared the arrival of robots the most. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have changed this conversation.

White-collar workers, such as graphic designers and lawyers, are also starting to worry about their jobs. A recent study of the online job market found that writing and editing earnings have fallen by more than 10% since the launch of ChatGPT. The big economy may be the canary in this coal mine. There is great uncertainty about whether AI is destroying more jobs than it creates. But one thing can be said for sure: Artificial intelligence will significantly impact our business.

3. The death of the article

The education sector reacted to the emergence of ChatGPT with some hostility; Many schools and educational authorities immediately banned the use of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT can write essays, how about assignments?

Of course, we don’t ask people to write articles because they’re under-resourced, and many jobs even require it. We want them to write articles because it requires research skills, advanced communication skills, critical thinking and subject area knowledge. No matter what ChatGPT offers, these skills will still be needed, even if we spend less time developing them.

And it’s not just schoolchildren who fool the AI. Earlier this year, a US judge fined two lawyers and a law firm $5,000 over a court file containing fictional legal quotes written using ChatGPT.

I think these are growing pains. Education is a field where AI has a lot to offer. Large language models such as ChatGPT can be configured with excellent Socratic teachers, for example. Intelligent learning systems can be infinitely patient and create precisely targeted questions to be repeated.

4. Copyright chaos

Personal. Authors around the world were outraged when they discovered that many important language models such as ChatGPT were trained on hundreds of thousands of books downloaded from the Internet without their consent.

The reason why AI models can talk freely about everything from AI to zoology is because they have learned books on everything from AI to zoology. AI books include my own copyrighted AI books.

The irony of an AI professor’s AI books being controversially used to teach AI did not escape me. There are currently multiple class action lawsuits pending in the US to determine whether this constitutes a violation of copyright laws. ChatGPT users have even pointed out examples of chatbots producing entire text passages taken verbatim from copyrighted books.

5. Misinformation and disinformation

The issue that concerns me most in the short term is the use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create misinformation and disinformation. This concern extends beyond synthetic text to fake audio and video that are indistinguishable from the real thing. A bank has already been robbed using cloned voices created by artificial intelligence.

Now the elections are also in danger. Deepfakes played an unfortunate role in the 2023 Slovak parliamentary election campaign. Two days before the elections, a fake audio recording about election fraud, allegedly featuring a well-known journalist from an independent news platform and the head of the Progressive Slovakia party, reached thousands of social media users. Commentators argue that such fake content could significantly affect election results.

According to The Economist, more than four billion people will vote in various elections next year. What happens when we combine the reach of social media in an election like this with the power and persuasiveness of artificial intelligence-generated fake content? Will this create a wave of disinformation and misinformation in our already fragile democracies?

It’s hard to predict what will happen next year. But if 2023 has to pass, I suggest you buckle up.