In today’s fast-paced business environment, AI chatbots like ChatGPT can offer significant benefits in terms of both speed and efficiency, but they also pose some potential risks, and because of this, their use should be carefully considered and monitored.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI-based chatbot which OpenAI developed. ChatGPT was designed to have conversations with humans in a natural way, with the ability to understand and respond to almost any topic or question. The chatbot is pre-trained on a very large-scale dataset of text data.
Why is ChatGPT popular with businesses?
ChatGPT is one of the most impressive publicly available chatbots to be released. It allows anyone to be more efficient and automate routine or repetitive tasks. For businesses, it could power a customer support bot or write an email response for you, which allows more time on higher priority tasks. People are recognising the impact it could have and are adopting it wherever possible. This is clearly evident through their excess of 100 million users, 1 million of which joined in the first five days of release, making it one of the quickest-growing web applications ever to exist.
What are the risks when using ChatGPT in my business?
So far, it seems that tech like this could be revolutionary for a business and make many tasks easier and more cost-effective, so what could go wrong? Even now, in its current state ChatGPT still sometimes struggles to understand prompts or give incorrect information. The worst part is that ChatGPT will still be confident in its own answers if the information is incorrect. This leads to issues, especially if the person asking the prompts isn’t very educated in the area they are asking about. This could result in misunderstandings, confusion and potential legal issues if a response is used incorrectly.
The biggest issue, though, lies with its privacy and security risk. When someone uses a chatbot, most of the time, the provider will store the prompt that you submitted. Your data could be at risk if this provider has a breach or cyber attack. Not only that, but the chatbots typically learn from your prompts, and so theoretically, if a user gave over sensitive information about themselves or their company, then this could be used as learning data, and the chatbot could potentially release that in response to someone else. ChatGPT confirms this:
“Will you use my conversations for training? Yes. Your conversations may be reviewed by our AI trainers to improve our systems.” OpenAI
How can you stay safe when using ChatGPT?
If you are an employee, sole trader or small business, ensure you are not using sensitive information within your prompts to ChatGPT or any other chatbots. Also, always double-check the responses against other information if the topic you're asking about is something you might not know much about.
If you are an employer or in any managerial role, then it's important that you educate yourself and those around you about the potential risks involved when using chatbots. Make sure you clearly define the scope for which employees could use chatbots and the limitations that might be in place. This would come hand in hand with regular review to ensure that it is up to date with any new regulations or legislation that may emerge in the future. You could also provide training on how to use chatbots correctly to increase efficiency while ensuring that risk is to a minimum; if that is something you decide is right for your organisation, it's vital to ask for feedback from the users to help you understand where it could fit in within your business practices.
Implementing these best practices could be the key to using the power of groundbreaking AI to your business's advantage.
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