ChatGPT: Use of AI chatbot in Congress and court rooms poses ethical questions

Since its November introduction, the user-friendly AI tool ChatGPT has racked up hundreds of millions of users and is poised to upend numerous sectors of the global economy. The AI content produced by the bot has recently been used in the US Congress, Columbian courts, and a speech by the president of Israel. Is universal adoption inevitable and moral? Wednesday's cybersecurity conference in Tel Aviv opened with a prerecorded greeting from Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who was about to deliver a speech that would go down in history: “I am truly proud to be the president of a country that is home to such a vibrant and innovative hi-tech industry. Over the past few decades, Israel has consistently been at the forefront of technological advancement, and our achievements in the fields of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data are truly impressive.” The president then revealed that his remarks had been authored by the ChatGPT AI bot, shocking the entrepreneurs at Cybertech Global and making him the first world leader to publicly use artificial intelligence to make a speech. However, he wasn't the first politician to do so. On the House of Representatives floor a week prior, US Congressman Jake Auchincloss read a speech produced using ChatGPT. Another first was launched in Congress to bring awareness to the enormously popular new AI tool "so that we have a debate today about deliberate policy for AI," according to Auchincloss. The California-based business OpenAI's ChatGPT, which was introduced in November 2022, is thought to have amassed 100 million active monthly users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

AI might become a general purpose technology: foundational in every sector. I delivered the first AI-drafted congressional speech yesterday as a call to action. Policymakers need to be purposeful and proactive. pic.twitter.com/8zyxSR02Y6

— Rep. Jake Auchincloss (@RepAuchincloss) January 26, 2023

The approachable AI tool makes use of web data to produce prompt, human-like responses to user inquiries. In addition to being able to quickly write written content on any subject and in any format—from essays, speeches, and poetry to computer code—it can quickly search the internet for information and deliver responses similar to Google's search engine. According to a research from Swiss financial behemoth UBS, the tool received almost 13 million unique visits daily in January and is currently free. Also read: How To Use ChatGPT? AI Chatbot That has Taken The World By Storm According to Mirco Musolesi, professor of computer science at University College London, it scales up incredibly effectively with millions of users, which is part of what appeals to the general public about it. However, it also provides excellent training in terms of both the calibre of the data used and the manner the authors dealt with challenging elements. Similar technologies in the past have led to the aggressive, hostile tone that social media posts take on when consumed by bots. Not so with ChatGPT, where a large portion of the tool's millions of users interact with it for amusement or curiosity. “Humans have this idea of being very special, but then you see this machine that is able to produce something very similar to us,” Musolesi says. “We knew that this this was probably possible but actually seeing it is very interesting.”