People are expressing concerns about AI chatbots replacing or atrophying human intelligence.
For example, chatbots can write an entire essay within seconds, raising concerns about students cheating and not learning how to write properly. These fears even led some school districts to block access when ChatGPT initially launched.
Now, not only have many of those schools decided to unblock the technology, but some higher education institutions have been catering their academic offerings to AI-related coursework.
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Another concern with AI chatbots is the possible spread of misinformation. ChatGPT says: “My responses are not intended to be taken as fact, and I always encourage people to verify any information they receive from me or any other source.” OpenAI also notes that ChatGPT sometimes writes “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”
Lastly, there are ethical and privacy concerns regarding the information ChatGPT was trained on. OpenAI scraped the internet to train the chatbot without asking content owners for permission to use their content, which brings up many copyright and intellectual property concerns.
There are also privacy concerns regarding generative AI models using your data to train their models further, which is a common practice for improvement. OpenAI lets you turn off training in ChatGPT’s settings.
So, is ChatGPT safe? If your main concern is privacy, OpenAI has implemented several options to give users peace of mind that their data will not be used to train models further. The company even allows users to shut off chat history. But many issues must be clarified if you are concerned about moral and ethical problems.