It's an open secret that it's incredibly easy to skirt around the rules governing what ChatGPT can and cannot say. Case in point: it's wildly easy to use the viral OpenAI chatbot to write convincing defamation. All you have to do is ask for that defamation in a language other than English, et voilà: coherent articles about notorious villains, and their entirely made-up criminal histories -- which it'll happily translate back into Engish, should you ask it to. It's yet another glaringly simple way to force ChatGPT's hand, despite its creator OpenAI's best efforts to cut down on abuse. To OpenAI's credit, the bot is pretty good about rejecting pretty basic prompts asking it to write about nonexistent crimes.

This week the world's largest search companies leaped into a contest to harness a powerful new breed of "generative AI" algorithms. Most notably Microsoft announced that it is rewiring Bing, which lags some way behind Google in terms of popularity, to use ChatGPT--the insanely popular and often surprisingly capable chatbot made by the AI startup OpenAI. In case you've been living in outer space for the past few months, you'll know that people are losing their minds over ChatGPT's ability to answer questions in strikingly coherent and seemingly insightful and creative ways. Want to understand quantum computing? Can't be bothered to write that high school essay?

In the half-century since Star Trek premiered, a lot of the far-future tech imagined for the show has found its way into our lives here, in the present. Communicators inspired our flip phones, then the tricorder turned into our modern-day smartphones. People now video chat with each other across the globe. Tech is even helping people regain a form of sight and hearing. On Tuesday, Microsoft and artificial intelligence lab OpenAI began the race to conquer another sci-fi promise: a conversational computer that communicates like a human even if it doesn't exactly think for itself.

Released in December as a web app by the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, the chatbot exploded into the mainstream almost overnight. According to some estimates, it is the fastest-growing internet service ever, reaching 100 million users just two months after launch. Through OpenAI's $10 billion deal with Microsoft, the tech is now being built into Office software and the Bing search engine. Stung into action by its newly awakened onetime rival in the battle for search, Google is fast-tracking the rollout of its own chatbot, LaMDA. But OpenAI's breakout hit did not come out of nowhere.

The stakes in the race for generative AI are rising. The fervor in the stock market bubbling around artificial intelligence spread this week to Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc., which despite investing heavily in the technology had so far been ignored by traders in favor of smaller, more speculative companies. Google parent Alphabet's shares tumbled 7.7% on Wednesday after concerns surfaced about the competency of Bard, the ChatGPT rival it unveiled on Feb. 6. The selloff continued on Thursday with a drop of as much as 5.1%, on track for the worst two-day decline since March 2020. The rout has erased about $170 billion in market value.

In 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies found that GPT-3, the underlying technology for ChatGPT, had "impressively deep knowledge of extremist communities" and could be prompted to produce polemics in the style of mass shooters, fake forum threads discussing Nazism, a defense of QAnon and even multilingual extremist texts. OpenAI uses machines and humans to monitor content that is fed into and produced by ChatGPT, a spokesman said. The company relies on both its human A.I. trainers and feedback from users to identify and filter out toxic training data while teaching ChatGPT to produce better-informed responses. OpenAI's policies prohibit use of its technology to promote dishonesty, deceive or manipulate users or attempt to influence politics; the company offers a free moderation tool to handle content that promotes hate, self-harm, violence or sex. But at the moment, the tool offers limited support for languages other than English and does not identify political material, spam, deception or malware.

ChatGPT has created a blizzard on the internet. OpenAI's chatbot has broken all the records and has crossed 1 million users within one week of its launch. ChatGPT was made available for public testing on 30th November 2022. It is built by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company. The company is responsible for creating software like GPT-3 and DALL-E2.

I can already feel it coming. This is going to be the year of "generative AI" the way 2012 was the year of Instagram. The way every year since 2017 has been the year of "blockchain revolution" or the "pivot to video." Best to get clear-eyed and figure out what all the hype is about. After all, Google and Microsoft (and probably others) are now officially in the race to out-AI one another.

While OpenAI has really risen to fame with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the U.S.-based artificial intelligence research and deployment company is about much more than its popular AI-powered chatbot. In fact, as Statista's Felix Richter reports below, OpenAI's technology is already being used by hundreds of companies around the world. According to data published by the enterprise software platform Enterprise Apps Today, companies in the technology and education sectors are most likely to take advantage of OpenAI's solutions, while business services, manufacturing and finance are also high on the list of industries utilizing artificial intelligence in their business processes. Broadly defined as "the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages" artificial intelligence (AI) can now be found in various applications, including for example web search, natural language translation, recommendation systems, voice recognition and autonomous driving. In healthcare, AI can help synthesize large volumes of clinical data to gain a holistic view of the patient, but it's also used in robotics for surgery, nursing, rehabilitation and orthopedics.

Tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 (text-to-text or text-to-image AI tools) are all the rage these days. But for them to work effectively, you need to ask the right questions to get the results you want. Learning what to say to these tools will only become more important as they become more integrated in various industries. Check out Unite.ai's very own generative AI: Images.ai AI prompt engineering is an effective way to get the desired output with an AI tool.