"How ChatGPT Will Change the World"

2024/03/14

Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is attracting a great deal of interest, and bookstores are filled with many books enlightening people about generative AI. Since I am publishing a new book in this environment, I decided to explain the risks and impacts of generative AI in addition to its benefits. In fact, generative AI is an incomplete technology, and when companies and other organizations use it for business, they need to face the risks and impacts head-on.

Yukichi Fukuzawa left behind the words, "In the world of belief, there is much deception," but the mechanism of generative AI simply creates plausible sentences by probabilistically connecting words. Naturally, there are many errors, and one should not blindly believe the output of generative AI. Furthermore, generative AI has the problem of bias. For example, in the case of ChatGPT, it has been pointed out that it generates liberal-leaning text. It is said that OpenAI, which builds and operates ChatGPT, removed sentences containing slanderous expressions from the training data to avoid generating slanderous sentences. It is speculated that this is because sentences written by non-liberals contained relatively more slanderous expressions, and as a result, the learning of non-liberal sentences decreased. In other words, it is easy to bias generative AI. For example, when generative AI is asked to create a cooking recipe, stealth marketing could occur, such as including specific seasonings from specific manufacturers. Also, generative AI becomes an attractive technology for authoritarian states. Since generative AI easily tells us the answers we want to know, we tend to be satisfied with the results and do not bother to look up the information that formed the basis of the answer. If an authoritarian state provides its citizens with generative AI that excludes information inconvenient for the state, those citizens will be trapped in an information space convenient for the state.

Now, there is a continuation to the aforementioned Yukichi Fukuzawa's "In the world of belief, there is much deception," which is "In the world of doubt, there is much truth." In the age of generative AI, unfortunately, a situation filled with disinformation and misinformation is expected, and as a result, humans are required to have the ability to discern correct information from a variety of information. I hope this book will be of some help.

"How ChatGPT Will Change the World"

Ichiro Sato

Chuko Shinsho La Clef

240 pages, 968 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.