There have been a number of recent inflection points in the information age when a mere product has become a movement: the debut of the iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle and the rise of Facebook and Netflix are among them.
But the debut of ChatGPT in November 2022 was something else entirely. Within weeks, the generative artificial intelligence application from San Francisco-based startup OpenAI became the most rapidly adopted web application in history, used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It spawned aheadlong race to exploit afield of AI –large language models (LLMs) trained on masses of digital information – that only emerged in 2018.
AI systems have been in use for decades, deciding the order of posts in your Facebook newsfeed and enabling Smartgate machines in airports to match your face with your passport photo. But the versatility of Chat-GPT, which was able to assemble coherent responses to awide range of questions, has meant everyone from students to business leaders and politicians have finally been able to grasp AI’s power.
Hollywood actors and scriptwriters took to the picket lines in protest over its use to automatically generate new works based on their visage, words and ideas. University and high school teachers had to wade through a deluge
