Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister Delegate for Digital, plays the card of caution in the face of the euphoria generated by ChatGPT on the artificial intelligence market. At the microphone of France infothis Monday, February 20, the successor to Cédric O estimated that the OpenAI conversational robot, recently integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, is “a fascinating tool [qui n’est] at this stage than an approximate parrot who sometimes somewhat awkwardly restores the astronomical sums of information he has compiled on the Internet”.
As the learning of ChatGPT knowledge concluded in 2021, the virtual agent can be put in difficulty if he is questioned about subsequent events, which Jean-Noël Barrot did not fail to point out. “Ask him who won the last football World Cup and you won’t be disappointed, since he will tell you that it’s France”he thus declared as an example.
ChatGPT, symbol of the promises and risks of AI
Beyond giving wrong answers, ChatGPT can also go completely off the rails. Microsoft has also restrained the conversational robot in Bing to limit its slippages, while it sometimes adopts strange behavior, which makes users uncomfortable. In this context, the Minister Delegate for Digital believes that the company OpenAI “would have done better to wait to have filters” to reduce any deviations “before posting”. It also highlights the “risks of discrimination, manipulation and dehumanization [et les questions] ethical and democratic issues that must be addressed” with the use of conversational artificial intelligences like ChatGPT.
However, not everything is to be thrown away for Jean-Noël Barrot. The latter judges that this AI has “the merit of highlighting the growing place that artificial intelligence occupies in our daily lives, with its promises and its risks”. He also reminds us that AI saves lives and that “we could not have discovered the Covid vaccine so quickly” without her. Improvements are expected for ChatGPT and other chatbots, like Google’s Bard, and not just by the minister. Indeed, if nearly one in five French people have already used ChatGPT, a majority of the population (53%) perceives this technology as a threat rather than an opportunity.