Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, & Cybersecurity: What the World Can Expect

Artificial intelligence is the biggest and the most intriguing reality of today that has bestowed mankind with limitless opportunities to make life better. So much so that many leaders, who are ready to lead the change, are happily calling it the backbone of digital transformations. It’s no exaggeration to say artificial intelligence has fundamentally restructured our lives, businesses, workflow patterns, and most industries.

Tech titan, Bill Gates eloquently put his thoughts on the advancement of artificial intelligence stating that the very essence of being human or the purpose of humanity was not to just sit behind a counter and sell things. It’s true. Human beings are definitely meant to accomplish far greater things and free themselves of menial jobs and redundant tasks.

Yann LeCun, a New York University Professor very rightly said a human’s intelligence makes them human, and ‘AI is an extension of that quality. Artificial intelligence is extending what we can do with our abilities. In this way, it’s letting us become more human.’

In the last decade, the AI revolution suddenly exploded and ushered in an impressive myriad of tools, and techniques like ChatGPT, and also introduced the world to some of the finest entrepreneurs who are at the helm of business innovation. While speaking about entrepreneurs, here’s a take on how entrepreneurs and start-ups are adopting AI to achieve their goals.

AI – An Entrepreneur’s New Pal

Almost two decades ago, former world chess champion, Garry Kasparov didn’t stand a chance while competing with Deep Blue, IBM’s AI-powered super-computer. While Garry was working on 3 moves per second (that’s amazing) but this AI baby was evaluating more than 200 million moves! Obviously, post the win, Deep Blue became quite the celebrity.

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Now imagine what that would it mean in today’s entrepreneurial era when you can have someone smarter from Deep Blue’s family on your management team. Can you even think of the number of ideas you would generate? And how quickly you’d be able to come up with a plan to turn those ideas into profitable products and services? And the best part, your ideas will be free of biases and ambiguous thinking.

It is no rocket science to understand that entrepreneurs can work with AI’s whole new army of applications and tools, machine learning being the most significant one. From coining an idea and developing it to executing it, AI can really be the best friend everyone wants.

With AI, an entrepreneur can:

• Access to clean, structured data of customers and the interaction.
• Explore cloud-based platforms and several AI applications such as Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud AI.
• Screen resume with the help of natural language processing.
• Manage candidate experience with the help of chatbots.
• Analyze online customer forums.
• Understanding the tone of the customer through sentiment analysis.

A while ago, AI generously helped out IntelligentX, a British start-up to actually introduce a whole new line of beers, which means, AI actually took the baton in the designing and prototyping phase. The firm took the first step by using a bot to enquire about flavor preferences and later this data was input algorithm and voila, the first line of beer was ready and that too, the flavor preferred by the customer!

A recent report by consulting behemoth McKinsey & Company stated that the number of businesses adopting AI has more than doubled in the last few years. Under the umbrella of artificial intelligence, natural language generation, robotic process automation, and computer vision turned out to be the popular stars.

AI’s Future in Healthcare

Another area where AI’s contribution is highly anticipated is the healthcare industry. From predicting pandemics and suggesting effective treatments to handling staffing and planning rosters, healthcare is enhancing the life and healthcare providers as well as patients.

Improving Data Efficiency

One of the most important aspects of healthcare that is highly dependable on AI is handling patient information. Data is used primarily to – set up follow-visits, prescribe medicines, and make appointments and even a small error recording the data can lead to medical disasters. AI is helping medical staff and healthcare providers to enhance data efficiency.

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AI-assisted Surgery

AI’s priced tool – robots will now be a doctor’s best accomplice in the operating table. They can analyze the pre-op medical data of the patient and accordingly advise the appropriate instruments and new surgical techniques during surgery. This may not seem all that critical but in reality, in AI-assisted surgeries, the hospital stay has reduced. A study comprising of 300 orthopedic patients found that AI-assisted robots helped in reducing five times complications against instances where the surgeon was operating alone.

Virtual Nursing Assistants

Just like chatbots are refurbishing customer service, virtual nursing assistants are the next-generation clinical support who is aptly answering patient queries. The presence of virtual nurses means that the hospital or clinic can cut down the money and invest in more critical areas. With them, patients and healthcare professionals can expect a more transparent, streamlined, and effective mode of communication. This has further helped in reducing readmissions and hospital visits.

Automating Administrative Tasks

Another area where is saving tremendous time and money is by automating administrative tasks. Technologies like voice-to-text transcriptions are expected to slash manual tasks like prescribing medicines and writing notes. With this administrators and staff can focus on enhancing the patient experience.

ChatGPT in Customer Support

AI has created a wonderful equilibrium of sorts where the customer knows the seller as much as they know them, initiating a seamless relationship of sorts. A recent survey found that roughly 53% of customers are likely to shop with a business if they have a messaging option on the app for queries and FAQs. In today’s fast-paced world, customers are anxious and impatient and thus expect immediate responses.

Chatbots, in a way, are the underdogs of the technological world that represent your business 24/7 through automatic customer support and enable the customer to get instant query resolution.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst into the tech arena like one army of conversational AI. Short for chat-based Generative Pre-trained Transformer, ChatGPT is yet another sub-part of intelligence that enables users to interact with machines in a natural, human-like way. Built by OpenAI, a San Francisco company, ChatGPT’s mimicking style makes it better for corporate training, especially the e-learning models. ChatGPT is built on the GPT3 AI platform which accommodates some of the biggest language models which include supervised as well as unsupervised learning techniques.

A Toronto-based company, ADa has automated 4.5 billion customer service interactions and not just that, it has partnered with OpenAI to use its popular ChatGPT. Other companies which are relying on ChatGPT include Shopify and Canva.

At Ada, Chatbot is helping users to book AirAsia flight tickets, or enabling customers to track orders as well as returns for Meta’s virtual reality products.

One feature which stands out in ChatGPT, unlike its predecessors is its ability to store the entire conversation history and filter it out accurately so that any hints of racism or any other not-so-welcome prompts are identified and cut out.

In this model, users can type their queries using the natural language and the chatbot offers conversational responses which are carefully extracted from huge datasets both from the public domain as well as the internet. ChatGPT has enormous potential to absorb as much data as possible.

ChatGPT in Education

Given the history of never repeating the same sentence twice (all thanks to generative AI) every time a question is asked, imagine the engaging teaching techniques as well as earning opportunities ChatGPT will bring to the academic industry. We love this idea, however, academicians, educators, and opinion writers are contemplating the impact of ChatGPT in the near future. They strongly fear that students will truly invest time in honing their skills from the scratch or just allow ChatGPT to do all the work for them.

Acting on the obvious fear surrounding ChatGPT which is known for its prolific, lifelike writing, the New York City Department of Education, on January 3, 2023, blocked access to ChatGPT on school devices and networks. Talking about the dramatic step, a spokesperson stated that “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”

ChatGPT is phenomenal in churning out uber-perfect essay responses on literally any topic under the sun. With ChatGPT’s ability to work on a wide range of subjects with such expertise, many schools and educators are under immense distress about the fact that their writing assignments could soon become obsolete. And what’s worse? It could encourage plagiarism and cheating.

Education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said,

“Due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content, access to ChatGPT is restricted on New York City Public Schools’ networks and devices. While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”

Individual schools do have the freedom to request access if they were willing to study the technology that drives the chatbot.

If this dynamic technology is used in the right way, it can be a friend to the classroom, and students and teachers can both make the most of it. The larger fact remains that ChatGPT may be a good synthesizer but to fear its involvement in the education system, it must be a critical thinker too, a trait only humans can ace, don’t you think?

Transforming the Cybersecurity Landscape

With the emergence of a remote working environment, cybersecurity as an industry saw a sudden and sharp rise in the number of threats, software vulnerabilities, and data proliferation. Artificial intelligence is enabling several under-resourced security operations analysts to go beyond the threats. A report by McKinsey predicted that in the coming years, cyber-attacks will be prevented with the use of AI tools such as machine learning, and automation.

Cybersecurity has been on an upward trend ever since the pandemic came unannounced. Several renowned companies are investing in technology to ensure the smooth running of their business and support remote work, and improve customer experience.

The cybersecurity industry consists of the Internet Of Things (IoT), cloud systems, smart devices, and drones, and together, they are refurbishing the way companies are doing business.

Why IoT and OT Devices are Easy Targets?

Today, IoT and OT devices have become easy targets for cybercriminals. Here are some reasons why they are most vulnerable.

Surprisingly, IoT and OT devices lack stringent security, thus making them the natural targets for ransomware attacks. It is believed that a little more than half of manufacturers feel that OT assets are sensitive to cyber attackers.

Another reason why IoT and OT devices often comprise is the absence of regular updates for their firmware and hence they are perennially at high risk of compromise. It is a known fact that most security teams grapple with securing IoT devices.

Most often than not, ransomware attacks are quite aggressive and can inflict extensive damage, halt production, disrupt supply chains, etc. A popular example is Colonial Pipeline where the attack caused uncertainty, panic, and even an abrupt halt in infrastructure.

AI’s role in cybersecurity 

By 2025, a report has predicted that AI and automation, and the Industrial IoT (IIoT) are set to become a $500 billion market.

AI comes packed with powerful tools that help to combat attacks simply by identifying and blocking threats and securing various other services and networks. With the help of learning patterns and autonomous systems, AI efficiently prevents any new attacks. Let’s take a look at how AI keeps the attacks at bay:

• With advanced techniques in AI and machine learning, you can analyze suspicious patterns and vulnerabilities, thus enhancing security.
• AI constantly evaluates the transactional data in the company’s network and eliminates any possible threats.
• With the use of behavioral analysis, AI identifies any malicious activity in real-time and provides immediate assistance.
• AI creates a point of reference for an organization’s network traffic and uses the same to protect the network.

AI applications in cybersecurity:

• Authenticating users.
• Protecting passwords.
• Detecting phishing attacks.
• Filtering spam.
• Malware detection.
• Predicting breach risk.

Currently, Ai and ML both are indispensable solutions as well as preventive mechanisms in the world of cyber attacks. AI is adept at enabling businesses to discover devices and also identify hidden patterns, while also working out huge amounts of data sets while ML can keep track of incoming and outgoing traffic and detect any abnormality in the IoT ecosystem. At the discovery of any threat, alarms can be instantly sent to the security department and warn them about the activity.

Apart from monitoring traffic and intimating the security personnel in the case of suspicious traffic, AI and ML will be an integral part of building lightweight detection technologies. This will be exceptionally helpful in instance where the IoT devices do not have the processing power and may have to rely on behavior-based capabilities.

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When we talk about the future of cybersecurity, both AI and ML can be termed as a double-edged sword. AI can be responsible for automation like timings of the attack and target selection to avoid any kind of detection. Not just this, deep fakes, and AI-powered password guessing are also vulnerable in their own ways. And so businesses have to be on their toes to notice any potential malicious threat to their own AI systems. In the past, cybercriminals have smartly copied the ML model for Proofpoint Email Protection and let the malicious email pass through filters.

At a time when cybersecurity is powerful yet vulnerable, it is extremely difficult to ward off cyber threats without the implementation of advanced AI.

Final Thoughts

Today, the technological world and businesses desperately need AI intervention to streamline processes, detect threats, monitor epidemics, and assist surgeries, enabling an engaging learning experience.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]