KUALA LUMPUR, May 26 — Technology has evolved and affected content development and consumption in so many ways over the years.
It has given greater access to people from all over the world and revolutionised various industries including the education sector.
For better or worse, technology will continue to evolve and bring new inventions to our lives all the time.
One of the new tech inventions that has made many headlines lately is ChatGPT.
For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is a language-processing tool developed by OpenAI and released last November.
It was built to allow people to have human-like conversations with the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
Simply put, the chatbot can answer questions and assist users with tasks such as composing emails, essays and code.
The AI software is able to pull pre-existing information from search engines and develop content from people’s search queries based on keywords, phrases or topics.
As incredible as it may sound, such a system may also bring about new sets of challenges as far as authenticity, accuracy and consistency of information is concerned.
It didn’t help when Geoffrey Hinton — a man widely seen as the godfather of AI — quit his job at Google recently over growing dangers from developments in the field.
Hinton reportedly told the media that the dangers of AI chatbots were quite scary as they soon may be more intelligent than humans.
Prior to that, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk along with a group of AI experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than GPT-4 in an open letter citing potential risks to society.
Most arguments surrounding AI suggest that such systems shouldn’t be developed with the aim to fuel job displacement, instead, they should be focused on enhancing human capabilities to work alongside AI.
Impact on the education sector
Just days after ChatGPT was launched last year, the technology was widely criticised as a free essay-writing tool that would make it easy for students to cheat on assignments.
Some schools in the US took quick and drastic action to block access to the OpenAI website and some universities in the UK issued warning to students against using ChatGPT to cheat.
The mixed reactions continued with various experts echoing different opinions towards the new “revolutionising” technology.
While some warned against the potentially dramatic impact of the chatbot on education, others remained optimistic that the technology may enhance human capabilities of learning as it would allow people to learn about things faster in different ways.
In fact, there are various types of chatbots that businesses may use to generate content or a response.
The commonly used ones by most service providers like airlines or telcos on their website are called rule-based chatbots that give the user a choice of options to click on to get an answer to a particular query.
The AI-operated chatbots, however, are more intelligent and understand a variety of keywords on the query to generate content from search engines.
There’s also the hybrid chatbot that combines rule-based and AI technology to detect the context of the query and provide answers.
This type of chatbot is commonly used by service providers that offer live chats with the customer service.
Intellectual property (IP) concerns
No doubt ChatGPT may come with many benefits.
However, it is imperative to address some of the concerns surrounding content custody, ownership and attribution when it’s generated by AI.
Although IP issues may not be a priority concern for those who use chatbots as a conversational assistant for personal use, IP rights come into the picture when AI-generated content is used for commercial purposes.
As chatbots pull information from various sources to generate content, the problem surfaces when the original source of answers generated by AI are protected by IP laws.
Because of that, the US Copyright Office announced in a statement in March that AI-generated works were not eligible for copyright.
The office cited concerns about whether the material they produce is protected by copyright.
In Malaysia, the government has yet to develop any comprehensive legislation to regulate the various facets of AI and its usage, however, there are some existing laws that may tackle some aspects of IP regulations.
If ChatGPT is used in an IP setting, it will be subject to regulations such as the Patents Act 1983, Trademarks Act 2019 and Copyright Act 1987.
However, these legislations may need to be updated to keep up with the technological advancements and cater to AI inventions.
There will also be the issue of liability if the AI-produced IP was copied or infringed using someone else’s IP.
In such a case, it needs to be clear which party would be liable for the damages, the AI developer or the user of the AI tool.
With the lack of legislative clarity surrounding the topic, only experts would know how to tackle such issues to ensure IPs are protected.
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The firm ensures its clients are protected through IP protection laws.
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