From CEOs to Coders, Employees Experiment With New AI Programs‍

Thousands of early adopters have flocked to ChatGPT in search of speed or to avoid being left behind since its release.

‍

Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of online education company Coursera Inc., tested out OpenAI's ChatGPT shortly after its release in November.

‍

After using the chatbot to draft company letters and notes, he asked his executive assistant to also try using it to draft replies to his inbound emails, and they both tried it successfully. ChatGPT is prompted by her based on how she thinks he would react, and then he edits the answers it generates and sends them on to her.

‍

According to Mr. Maggioncalda, he spends more time thinking than writing. “I don't want to be the one who doesn't use it, since someone who does will benefit greatly from it."

‍

Business people across a spectrum of industries, including architecture, software, and entertainment, are currently testing out the new frontier in tech: so-called generative AI software that is capable of creating writing, images, and art that is similar to what a human would do.

‍

As a matter of fact, previously, artificial intelligence has been hidden within layers of back-end infrastructures in order to streamline logistics and automate content moderation. There are now applications like ChatGPT and the image-generator Midjourney that have placed the technology directly into the hands of individuals and small businesses who are using the tools to see if they can automate laborious tasks or speed up the creative process for themselves. The thrill of being able to do things that were never possible before drives some individuals, whereas for others, it's an existential need to be able to master the nascent technology in order to not be left behind. 

‍

The groundswell of experimentation over the past few years has forced larger corporations to take notice that such tools could soon shake up their industries and the way they do business. Some companies are beginning to take tentative steps with generative artificial intelligence, ranging from Netflix Inc. to Devon Energy Corp., a producer of oil and gas.

‍

AI experts, however, caution that such tools should only be used by people who are already experts in their field. AI has been shown to spew disturbing content and misinformation, and other concerns have emerged concerning intellectual property theft and privacy.

‍

"We must keep in mind that the purpose for which it is serving is not to inform you about things you do not know about. "It's really an excellent tool that will help you do the job you do a lot better," said Margaret Mitchell, who is the chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face, a startup specializing in AI research.

‍

Telmo Gomes, the co-founder and IT director of Melbourne-based LiveSense, said ChatGPT saves him time on research. Having been hired by a company to develop a system that can detect vaping in public places, he spent hours contacting people and researching which sensors would work best for the system that his company developed. There was limited information available; other companies selling vaping detection solutions did not disclose what they were using in their detection solutions.

‍

He then typed the question into ChatGPT. It returned several answers within a few seconds, including some that exactly matched the solutions he had settled on from his research. Additionally, it cautioned against monitoring people's behaviors without considering their ethics.

‍

Mr. Gomes said, "I was completely blown away by it.". He said, "We're a small company. We will be able to accomplish more with fewer resources."

‍

Nidhi Hegde, a designer at Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo, a global architecture firm that specializes in luxury hotels, said she realized generative AI would transform her profession when a client sent her early concept sketches created with Midjourney of the building they wanted.

‍

Midjourney, which was launched in July, is a web application that takes a range of prompts ranging from text to three-dimensional forms and allows users a great deal of control over the images that it generates.

‍

The sketches that the client provided are traditionally the responsibility of the architect, but Ms. Hegde became more involved in the process as it developed. The client's images were fed back into Midjourney and she asked the program to create several new variations that were different from the original design but kept the same overall look and feel. She said that the final version was well received by the clients.

‍

“The role of the architect has really, really changed in the last few years," she said. “Our industry as a whole needs to rethink what we do as a service in order to stay competitive.”

‍

Hegde is now frequently using Midjourney for her projects, and she dedicates the first half day to what she calls "the failure stage." Once, she fed Midjourney an image of a rock and asked it to "make the rock gold," and it produced a sparkling gold torso of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

‍

Sean Harry, the company's managing principal of design technology, who is leading the effort, says the rapid change is prompting the firm to formalize policies around generative AI.

‍

During a recent visit to the Oklahoma headquarters of Devon Energy, which drills for oil and gas, a group of technicians demonstrated that they were able to use ChatGPT to run a test on their code, as Trey Lowe, the company's chief technology officer explained. As part of its responsibilities, this group manages the company's automation system, which controls oil field equipment in the field.

‍

Separately, engineers and scientists have begun using the tool to summarize large technical documents. Experiments convinced the company to pay close attention to the development of the technology.

‍

The company expects ChatGPT will be able to search academic repositories one day, and put together a concise report summarizing say, a hundred scientific papers about hydrogen that have been published over the last couple of decades. "For some people, just a summary of what's going on will be sufficient to help them make a decision," he said, explaining that the summary is beneficial to them.

‍

In late 2022, Lucas Winterbottom, a software engineer at Hong Kong-based financial technology startup Reap, began using Copilot, an AI-based coding assistant that is based on an earlier version of ChatGPT's underlying technology and which became available to an early batch of test users in mid-2022. He now uses ChatGPT on a daily basis to speed up the coding tasks he is required to do in his job, switching to it when he needs help with less common coding issues.

‍

ChatGPT also helps him draft internal company notes 90% of the way, he said. He said, "I'm a techie.". "Writing isn't my forte.".

‍

Technology has not been embraced by everyone. In his dissertation, Andrew Hundt, a robotics Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University, explained that he avoids coding with generative AI tools because they have been shown to copy chunks of their training data and he worries that might compromise the originality of the research he is doing. It soured his opinion of the tools as soon as he found out from other users that his own code was showing up in their generated outputs, which led him to become distrustful of them.

‍

It is also feared by many in white-collar and creative professions that as generative AI advances, they will be replaced by it as factory robots have done.

‍

There was backlash on Twitter when Netflix made a statement in February that it used generative AI to create the background images in a short anime film that was posted on YouTube as part of a program that was designed to experiment with new technologies. The move was criticized by critics because they said it threatened to take away opportunities from human artists.

‍

As Netflix's director of anime, Taiki Sakurai said, the company is committed to supporting the development of human talent at all levels.

‍

A number of publishers, including BuzzFeed Inc. and Sports Illustrated publisher Arena Group Holdings, are testing generative AI to generate articles and content.

‍

In a memo to employees, BuzzFeed chief executive Jonah Peretti wrote that human beings would provide ideas, "cultural currency" and "inspired prompts."

‍

It is still unclear what impact the new technology will have, according to Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies technological change. "ChatGPT has the distinction of sounding more like a human than other chat programs. As long as it is as human-like as possible, it will be able to replace human tasks as much as possible,” he said.

‍

In an interview with The Next Web, Surya Ravikumar, vice president of data at Singapore-based Smartkarma, a financial investment research platform that specializes in research on financial investments, explained the company has drawn a distinction between which content on its platform should and should not be automated.

‍

According to the firm, which offers independent investment advice to subscribers, ChatGPT is being used to create summaries and tweets of reports, as well as to write search-engine-optimized corporate blog posts that are posted outside the platform's paywall.

‍

AI will not be used by the company to write reports based on expert advice, Mr. Ravikumar said. “It's here that our platform really shines. That can't be generated," he said.

‍

There is no doubt that Midjourney has spread like wildfire among her colleagues at the American firm NBBJ, said architect Cynthia Ting. As part of her work with the Hong Kong chapter of the American Institute of Architects, she is working on building a think tank that will help architects learn how to use generative artificial intelligence and other technologies in their design process.

‍

“I believe that artificial intelligence will someday become our third brain,” Ms. Ting said. We have our left and right brains; sometimes we make decisions logically, and sometimes emotionally. In the future, we will have an artificial intelligence brain to provide us with information and data analysis. Making better decisions will be easier with it."