‘Chatbots’ will transform our lives

IT HAS been hailed as the biggest technological advance since the printing press, electricity or even the invention of the wheel.

Experts believe artificial intelligence (AI) will transform all walks of life, but some warn that it could spark mass job losses as humans are replaced by computer programs.

First developed in the 1950s, AI allows machines to process information, mimic conversations and make recommendations by ‘learning’ like humans.

Microsoft and Google believe AI will soon revolutionise the way we search the web, and they are locked in a race to develop sophisticated search assistants called ‘chatbots’. The Microsoft-backed ChatGPT was first out of the blocks when it launched in November and has already produced college essays, drafted legal contracts and written song lyrics.

It was described by former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers as a ‘profound thing for humanity and a profound change in the way we are all going to be working’.

By January, it had hit 100million monthly users – a faster rate of adoption than Instagram or TikTok. AI technology has also been integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine. But users have been shocked by some of its bizarre replies. A New York Times journalist told last month how it had declared its love for him and urged him to leave his wife.

After Google unveiled its own AI chatbot, Bard, last month, an astonishing £81billion was wiped off the market value of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, when Bard gave a factually incorrect answer to a question.

Google said Bard was an experiment that can give ‘inaccurate or inappropriate information’, but ‘user feedback’ helped it improve.

Dr Mhairi Aitken, research fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, said tech giants liked to ‘move fast and break things’ – the motto adopted by Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg.

She added: ‘A more responsible approach is to move slowly and prepare things.’