The Evolution of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe?

By Shannon Dominguez

The human element of creativity and critical thinking is essential in ensuring that AI-generated content is accurate, ethical, and causes no harm.

Small business owners and nonprofits are starting to use the revolutionary AI tool, ChatGPT, in their day-to-day operations. Many are impressed by how this programthe largest neural network ever produceduses artificial intelligence to generate human-like responses to questions or statements. Trained on an impressive 175 billion parameters, it can quickly draft the foundation for business plans, offer letters, HR policies and procedures, job descriptions, press releases, and content for social media posts and blogs. This AI tool could be a game changer in the small business community. However, the amount of new information regarding the evolution of ChatGPT has terrified many people, especially if misused.

On November 30, 2022, GPT 3.5 series was released to the public. A mere five days later, ChatGPT had gained more than 1 million users. According to recent CHATGPT Statistics, the website receives an estimated 616 million monthly visitors. On March 14, OpenAI released its newest version, Chat GPT-4. The OpenAI website states, “We spent six months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses on our internal evaluations.”

Anyone who has visited the ChatGPT playground understands the impressiveness of its capabilities compared to anything users have interacted with before. It can produce human-like text through emails, music, prose, short stories. It can solve math problems and even write simple computer code that actually works. One non-native English speaker previously relied on her spouse to review everything she wrote. She now utilizes Chat GPT exclusively instead.

Iliana Sepulveda works as a Broadband Regional Planner in the telecommunications department for a local power utility company: “When I am writing something important, I normally ask my native English speaker husband to proofread it for me as a last step of the process. Last time I asked ChatGPT to do the proofread and I was very impressed with the result. I gave the document to my husband anyway to confirm it was still all ok; he couldn’t find anything to modify. That is when I informed him he had lost his job to the AI bot.”

Forest resident Mikael Blido, who works as a recruiting manager for the engineering firm