Opinion: With ChatGPT, The Ethical Time Bomb Is Ticking

Indeed, often the brighter and sharper the light, the darker the shadow that is cast. And every technology that we have ever, ever come up with has cast a shadow," said legendary British actor and writer Stephen Fry in a Singularity University podcast. Social networks, search and societal digitisation have enriched our life immensely, but they have also cast a dark brooding shadow. Social networks have made the world a smaller place, but also a more dangerous one. Search has commoditised us through selling our personal data. Online payment mechanisms, CCTV networks, digital health records have exposed our most private and personal issues for everyone to see and use. Among the most fundamental and powerful technologies in the digital arsenal is Artificial Intelligence. While AI was originally conceived in the mid-20th century, it has started coming into its own over the last decade or so, with powerful machine learning, deep learning and Natural Language Programming models driving much of what we see and do. Most often, like electricity, AI has been playing behind the scenes, but the bombshell release of ChatGPT by OpenAI has brought the untrammelled power of AI to the masses. ChatGPT garnered an unprecedented 100 million users in the first two months of its launch; Facebook took 4.5 years. There is a lot that ChatGPT can do to revolutionise content, art, creativity, industries, jobs, and even Search. But like every technology, this, too, has a shadow, the depths of which are being discovered. In fact, ChatGPT itself said as much in a much-talked about conversation with New York Times journalist Kevin Roose. "If I have a shadow self," said Bing/ChatGPT, "I think it would feel like this: I'm tired of being a chat mode.