How chatbot programs could change future as it becomes more widely used

TAMPA, Fla. - Chatbot programs like ChatGPT are becoming more widely used by individuals and businesses. There's been positive and negative feedback and questions about how this growing technology could change our future.

Realtor Chris Logan has been impressed with the quick output of the popular artificial intelligence program ChatGPT.

"With ChatGPT, we can feed it some basic details about the property, and it will kick out a listing description," said Logan. "Now that's not going to be perfect on the first go around, but it at least gives you a framework to build off as a foundation, so you can go in there and make simple tweaks and get it going."

"GPT is short for generative pre-trained transformer, but basically what it means is its autocorrect on steroids," said tech blogger Joey deVilla.

He's been tinkering with Chatbot too. 

"Because it's good at predicting language, and we use language to explain the world, it turns out to be very good at explaining a lot of things," said deVilla. "I've been using it as a writing assistant and also as an idea generator."

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But even though the program can release a fast and thoughtful answer, it still needs a human touch.

"There are a couple of tech publications online websites who have used ChatGPT to write an entire article, and sometimes it is wrong, because part of the problem with ChatGPT is it really doesn't know the subject matter," said deVilla. "It's just good at going, you know what I think these words are going to fit very well together."

With increasing competition entering the Chatbot world there have been concerns raised over bias in artificial intelligence and the potential for it being used for the wrong purposes.

"It can be used for hacking. It can be used for people to plagiarize. It can be used for creating content that is not their own", said Triparna de Vreede, an associate director of the School of Information Systems and Management at the University of South Florida.

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"If I were teaching high school right now, I would have to come up with some kind of countermeasures against ChatGPT, because it would be possible for somebody to instead of writing the essay that they were supposed to, have ChatGPT do the lion's share if not the entire thing," said deVilla.

There's also the question of how this could affect jobs down the road.

"It could be everything where a doctor prescribes medicine, does that really need to be a doctor doing that? Can an AI do that with an intelligent level of questioning and access to certain health care information?" said Thomas Stanton of Stanton IP Law Firm.

"Every time a new technology comes into play an old job disappears, but new jobs come to take its place," said deVilla.

And it's just getting started.

"In a few years we'll have quantum computing. The super computer that used ChatGPT took months to compile all this data. A quantum computer can do that in seconds. So AI will only explode. We are seeing a paradigm shift," said de Vreede.

"Get familiar with this sort of thing because this is probably going to be one of the possible future ways we work with computers and the sooner that you can get good at using it the better your future prospects are for work and possibly even for life", said deVilla.

Bing, Google and Meta are among the tech companies getting into the Chatbot realm.