In November 2022, OpenAI came out with an artificial intelligence chatbot called ChatGPT, and it has been growing in popularity ever since, setting it to surpass TikTok’s growth in users.

ChatGPT’s capabilities have already been tested in a number of ways. From taking exams to making a holiday shopping list, people have been throwing problems at the AI to figure out how much it can do. And the results have been incredible. 

So far it has already passed both the U.S. bar exam and the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam and proven it can write computer codes, essays, convincing articles, music, plot ideas for a novel, tv show scenes and many other complex tasks. 

This new innovation has left a lot of people wondering what it will mean for the future of the job market as more time passes. Every day since November, news outlets and academic organizations seem to come out with more and more content, both warning and exploring how ChatGPT will change our world. 

On Feb. 2, Business Insider came out with a list of 10 jobs that ChatGPT is most likely to replace. The day before, Reuters was analyzing how fast the user base has grown. Every day more and more articles come out with new information about this chatbot.

But those are not the only questions we should be concerned about. I'm more curious about things like how it will be regulated? How efficient is it? How will it redefine the lines of ethics with the content it creates? How do we compare human to AI performance in a fair way?

The time has come. The hypothetical class discussions we had about artificial intelligence in our seventh grade ethics classes are finally here. And to be honest, we don’t seem to have any more clear answers than we did back then, which is all the more worrying considering that this is no longer hypothetical. 

Whatever discussions happen now regarding artificial intelligence and how we use and regulate it will have a huge impact on how we go forward from here.

I mean, the possible implications for the use of ChatGPT include hurt feelings if someone uses the AI to write a love poem for Valentine’s Day or plagiarism if students use it to write essays or academic papers. Business Insider also claims AI could replace journalists as a whole.

Schools are struggling to fight plagiarism as students use ChatGPT-generated essays and pass it off as their own. Because of how well the essays are written, detecting plagiarism in schools is now becoming increasingly difficult for teachers. 

Schools are taking the preemptive measure of banning ChatGPT use all together, but other experts are advising that training both students and faculty on how to use the program might be a more effective method. This just goes to show that no one is really prepared to deal with this. Experts are divided as far as how to deal with this brand new technology that is readily available.

As far as academic papers are concerned, the scientific community is split in their reactions to ChatGPT, with some publishers encouraging its use and others outright banning it. The chatbot has been proven capable of writing coherent academic papers that are deemed good enough to fit the standards of academic journals. 

While some see this as an advancement, others are raising concerns about not just having ChatGPT as a coauthor, but using it as a tool for research all together. 

There are concerns that since the AI gets its information from the internet, inaccurate work could make its way into academic journals. Additionally, there are ethical implications to using ChatGPT to write academic papers. These papers and publications rely on an accountability system where authors take responsibility for what they put out into the world and are able to answer questions about their papers and discuss them with other experts in their fields. The AI is not capable of doing this, and cannot be held accountable for what it writes.

As far as journalism is concerned, there are media outlets like Buzzfeed that have already announced their plans to use ChatGPT to produce content. A writer for insider experimented with the platform and asked it to write an article for her to incredibly convincing results. The problem was that the chatbot had no hesitation to include fake quotes in the article, making it a minefield of misinformation that read as a credible Insider article. 

Similarly to academia, the field of journalism is faced with the ethical problem of ChatGPT being alarmingly good at writing up the information, but having no regard for whether it was accurate or not. This chatbot thus becomes a great tool for generating fake news and spreading misinformation that is increasingly difficult to spot.

Once again the reaction is split on how ChatGPT will affect the field of journalism and how to deal with the ethical implications of using it. No one knows how to deal with this program..

Even after all that we still have to consider how much the human aspect of things is worth and whether or not it’s replaceable. Is journalism something that can be done by AI? How about legal jobs like paralegals and lawyers? If ChatGPT can pass the bar, what does that mean for the future of law? 

Or, maybe let’s consider teaching. According to an associate dean at Rochester Institute of Technology, ChatGPT is already equipped to teach classes. So when do teachers become obsolete? When do we decide that having kids learn from a robot is better than learning from a human? How long until the human element of teaching disappears?

There is no denying what an advancement of technology ChatGPT represents, nor how many improvements it could make for the world. But before we even start thinking about that, we need to consider all the worst case scenarios that could come from it and have a plan to address them. 

We need to consider how the AI can be used for nefarious purposes. And above all, we need to figure out how its involvement in society is going to be regulated. 

The technology is already out there, and it will continue to grow. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, but we need to figure out the rules that come with it and we need to do it soon.