ChatGPT has become very popular in a very short span of time. This innovative technology tool is helping users with wide range of tasks. It is one of the most powerful technology platforms created ever. This AI tool is getting huge adoption and has gained popularity around the world. Talking about its success, Aaron Bugal, Field CTO, APJ, Sophos said, “ChatGPT is a general knowledge artificial intelligence that has been trained on an extremely large data set from the public internet. While it is a remarkable accomplishment on the path toward more useful and intelligent machines, it is not nearly as important as some believe. It is an incredible break through, however it lacks legitimate "intelligence" and is merely a step further down the path toward that end goal.”
ChatGPT Impacting Industries
Every new technology brings some disruption to some extent. Talking about its’ impact across industries, he said, “We are just beginning to explore it's uses and I am sure there are people in almost every industry that feel that ChatGPT can help them do their job better or maybe replace them altogether in the future. However, at the moment its strength lies in its ability to trawl large amounts of data and provide answers in a confident way that make it sound accurate. For now, its advantages in the workplace are for querying search engines, databases, etc. where being able to predictably translate a questions into a technical query that can ask for results from a database. It is currently not able to answer complicated questions itself – not if you want the right answers. Humans interface with large amounts of data in almost every industry, so this application alone will make more information available to more people without the technical knowledge needed today for mining results from big data sets,” he said.
Cybersecurity Threat
Since its adoption among people, there has been a major concern related to cybersecurity. Sharing his views about the cybersecurity challenges associated with the adoption of ChatGPT, Aaron commented, “A major challenge of ChatGPT is that people feel like they are talking to an intelligent thing giving them the impression that it knows what it is talking about as it comes across very confidently. The problem is that it isn't actually thinking, it is just replying with words that statistically sound like they belong there, but it doesn't really impart any understanding, leading to very confident and very wrong answers. Criminals could certainly use this to generate phishing emails or malicious code, but it is unlikely to be a revolution in new malicious content. The code it can generate is no better than the code being written by cybercriminals today and we have effective tools to detect and block malicious computer programs.
He further added, “What is more concerning is how it could be used to manipulate people in social situations, like phishing attacks, as what it writes is more natural and correct sounding than the attack emails written by people without a strong command of the language they are writing in. This could allow low and mid-skill level attackers to improve the quality of their scam lures tempting people to click links and open email attachments.”
