Welcome to The Future: AI, ChatGPT, and More

Eve Krejci
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In one of the first sessions at ICON 2023, Alexandra M. Merceron, the current Executive Vice President for Rubenstein, a strategic communications & reputation management firm, and Lecturer at Columbia University, spoke about AI. Her session covered the history of AI, its flaws and features, the legal and ethical problems regarding AI and what to expect from it in the future.
History of AI:
The session began with how AI has been a part of lives for longer than anyone realizes. Take Siri, for example, she mentioned.
“It’s always been around, but now it's in our faces,” said Merceron.
Many corporations, including Forbes and The New York Times, have created their own AI platforms used within their ranks. “Bertie” is a publishing platform designed by Forbes in 2018 that has various artificial intelligence features intended to make writers more effective.
Introduction of ChatGPT:
Merceron stated that 2021 was the turning point for AI, as OpenAI introduced GPT3 that year. GPT3 is a neural network machine learning model trained using internet data to generate any type of text. It required a small amount of input text to create large volumes of relevant and sophisticated machine-generated text. In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a similar text-based AI model, which became the fastest technology to reach 100 million users.
Flaws and Features:
The main feature of ChatGPT is to respond to prompts and questions and compose various written content, including articles, social media posts, essays, code and emails. While ChatGPT is a cutting-edge technology platform, it has flaws. For example, Merceron mentioned that ChatGPT can output morals, values and ethics, making its information biased. Some data also comes from users and Wikipedia, which can create results with skewed biases.
Who Uses AI and How:
Companies and other organizations, like Nike and Netflix, as well as the general public, use ChatGPT. Companies such as Facebook and Google are also hopping on the AI bandwagon by creating their own platforms. Newsrooms and PR agencies are progressively using it more and more to increase the quality of work and help manage their organizations. The more people use AI, the better it gets, so when these organizations utilize the different aspects of ChatGPT, it improves the data it gives back. 
“The more times you go into the tub, the more likely you are to pull out something great,” said Merceron.
Ethical and Legal Issues of AI:
As AI is not a person, the issue of copyright comes into question. If someone creates something with AI, do they have any rights over it? As decided by federal courts, if something is created by AI, copyright laws do not protect it because these laws only apply to human beings. 
Another issue with AI is the fact that it can eliminate jobs. For example, background actors can now be generated by AI. This calls into question whether or not the people whose faces were analyzed to use for the AI-generated background actors are entitled to financial compensation. The courts must decide these questions and situations as time passes and more problems arise.