Artificial intelligence chatbots: Friend or foe?

Breaking news at the time of writing is that American artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI has released Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 – more commonly known as GPT-4 (14 March 2023). The launch of this latest multimodal large language tool further increases the AI opportunities and risks facing the insurance industry. This latest version of OpenAI's chatbot can respond to images and it processes around eight times as many words as the original ChatGPT model launched in November 2022. Trained on text taken from the internet, ChatGPT has been designed to provide quick and understandable answers to any question. Read: AI has'enormous potential benefits' for insurance but regulators should target'safe and responsible adoption' – Kennedys Ian McKenna, chief executive of the Financial Technology Research Centre, said: "If you look at what some of these chatbots can do now and extrapolate what they will be able to do in four or five years' time, it's really quite scary. "People won't have to remember facts and data in the same way and it will have an enormous impact on insurance on so many fronts.