Start getting familiar with generative AI tools like ChatGPT. The world is moving forward, and you need to be ready to move with it.
It took Netflix three and a half years to reach 1 million users after introducing its groundbreaking, web-driven DVDs-by-mail subscription service in 1999. That was quite an accomplishment, given that people buying into new technologies at that time were considered a niche audience of first adopters unafraid to live on the cutting edge.
In the early 2000s, it took Airbnb two and half years to attract a million users, Facebook 10 months and music streaming service Spotify just five months to reach that audience size — a sign of increasing consumer comfort with innovative tech services that could add value to their daily lives. When Instagram attracted a million users after less than three months in 2010, it was a big deal, with industry watchers calling out the “insane growth” of the photo-sharing app.
If hitting a million users is a key milestone for turning an untested tech service into a mainstream destination, then think about this: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot that debuted on Nov. 30, 2022, reached 1 million users in five days.
Five days.
That’s mind-blowing.
Then think about this: ChatGPT drew 100 million users in just two months.
It speaks to the attention we’re all giving to a new generation of chatbots able to have human-like conversations. A year after its launch, ChatGPT has over 150 million unique users (who have to set up an account to use the site) and hosted nearly 1.7 billion visits in November, making it one of the world’s top online destinations, according to Similarweb. The researcher tracks the adoption of today’s most popular generative AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Bard, Microsoft Bing, Character.ai and Claude.ai.
What’s driving all that interest? The potential new use cases chatbots promise, despite privacy and security concerns about how they work and how they might be weaponized by bad actors. While AI has been part of our tech for decades — a large percentage of your Netflix and Amazon recommendations are based on an AI algorithm, for instance — gen AI is something else.
These chatbots are based on a large language model, or LLM, a type of AI neural network that uses deep learning (it tries to simulate the human brain) to work with an enormous set of data to perform a variety of natural language processing tasks.
What does that mean? They can understand, summarize, predict and generate new content in a way that’s easily accessible to everyone. Instead of needing to know programming code to speak to a gen AI chatbot, you can ask questions (known as “prompts” in AI lingo) using plain English. Version 3.5 of OpenAI’s GPT LLM, for instance, is trained on 300 billion words. Depending on what data it’s been fed, a chatbot can generate text, images, video and audio; do math calculations; analyze data and chart the results and even write programming code for you — often delivering results in seconds.
When it arrived in late 2022, ChatGPT made AI instantly and easily available for everyday people to access and try out. The software from OpenAI rocketed to 1 million users in just five days.
“Generative AI has been the subject of intense consumer excitement, especially with ChatGPT, because it really has brought a lot of tangibility to consumers,” says Brian Comiskey, a program director for the Consumer Technology Association. That’s why AI will be one of the big themes at the CTA’s annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas starting Jan. 9. “Consumers can see AI working for them in a lot of ways: I put in an input and I get a response back. I can test it out.”
In this article:
- Old jobs, new jobs, more jobs?
- Calling all prompt engineers
- A few ways you can play with gen AI today
- A way with words
- Turning words into images
- Video and audio
- Product recommendations, purchasing decisions
- Education
- Travel
- From copilots to companions, of a sort
- How to talk to a chatbot
- Some caveats
- What’s next
The testing you might consider doing as 2024 unfolds might include prompting a chatbot to do things that may have seemed impossible or taken you a lot of time, energy and resources before — like writing a short story about fishing in the style of Ernest Hemingway or summarizing a book or scientific study. You could plan a Taylor Swift-themed dance party, like CNET’s Abrar Al-Heeti did, or create a metaverse for a new game, plan a travel itinerary to Machu Picchu, have David Attenborough narrate your life, plan a meal with enough variety to satisfy meat eaters, vegetarians, vegans and the gluten-free or become a fashion designer and create a corduroy-inspired collection. You can even have a theoretical conversation with Jesus or Jane Austen.
The ability to have that back-and-forth with a human-sounding assistant is the big deal here, says Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “For the first time ever, we have created a technology that understands human language.”
While today’s chatbots aren’t really “artificial intelligences” because they’re not thinking, sentient entities that truly know and understand the world as humans do, a generative AI chatbot “can look at a stream of words and figure out what the person is trying to say, and respond to that prompt or that request,” says McAfee. “It’s a pretty remarkable feat.”
That’s why you should get up to speed on these chatbots — what they are, how they work and the opportunities and challenges they pose to humanity. These tools are literally changing the conversation, pun intended, around the future of work and education and how we may soon go about day-to-day tasks. So consider this an introduction to generative AI, including some practical tips about how you can start experimenting with some of the most popular tools today.
Don’t just take my word for it. I asked ChatGPT why we humans should know something about generative AI and tools like ChatGPT. Here’s what it said: “Knowing about generative AI and tools like ChatGPT empowers you to leverage the latest advancements, explore creative possibilities, enhance productivity, improve customer experiences, and contribute to the ethical and responsible use of AI.”
Old jobs, new jobs, more jobs?
The expected productivity and profit boost that automated tech could help deliver are already leading businesses to think about what they’ll expect from their human employees as soon as this year.
MIT’s Sloan School of Management partnered with the Boston Consulting Group and found that generative AI can improve performance by as much as 40% for highly skilled workers compared with those who don’t use it. Software engineers can code up to twice as fast using gen AI tools, according to studies cited by the Brookings Institute.
LinkedIn surveyed CIOs, CEOs, data scientists, software engineers and other heavy data users and asked them to use generative AI to see how much time they saved on tasks such as drafting emails, analyzing text and creating documents. What they said is that tasks that would now take them 10 hours manually could take them five to six hours less. That translates into spending 50% to 60% less time on some routine tasks so you can instead devote attention to more rewarding or higher-value work.
Most Americans (82%) haven’t even tried ChatGPT and over half say they’re more concerned than excited by the increased use of AI in their daily life, according to the Pew Research Center. Researchers there have started identifying jobs that may be affected in some way by generative AI. They include budget analysts, tax preparers, data entry keyers, law clerks, technical writers and web developers. Think roles whose tasks include “getting information” and “analyzing data or information,” Pew said.
Before you start worrying that AI will eat all the jobs, Goldman Sachs cautions that such concerns may be overblown, since new tech has historically ushered in new kinds of jobs. In a widely cited March 2023 report, the firm noted that 60% of today’s workers are employed in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940.
Even so, the firm predicts the labor market could face “significant disruption.” After reviewing 900 job roles, Goldman Sachs’ economists estimated that about two-thirds of US occupations are already exposed to some degree of automation and that “generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work.”
“Despite significant uncertainty around the potential of generative AI, its ability to generate content that is indistinguishable from human-created output and to break down communication barriers between humans and machines reflects a major advancement with potentially large macroeconomic effects,” Goldman Sachs’ economists concluded.
Putting aside the very real debate about whether gen AI-produced content is truly “indistinguishable” from human-created output (this story was completely written by a human, by the way), the point is this: What should today’s — and tomorrow’s — workers do?
The experts agree: Get comfortable with AI chatbots if you want to remain attractive to employers.
Instead of focusing on generative AI as a potential job killer, lean into the idea that chatbots can serve as your assistant or copilot, helping you do whatever it is better, faster, more effectively or in entirely new ways, thanks to having mostly reliable supercomputer you can converse and collaborate with (“Mostly reliable” refers to chatbots’ hallucination problem. Simply put, AI engines have a tendency to make up stuff that isn’t true but sounds like it’s true. More on that later.)
Calling all prompt engineers
The tech has already created a new kind of job called “prompt engineering.” It refers to someone able to effectively “talk” to chatbots because they know how to ask questions to get a satisfying result. Prompt engineers don’t necessarily need to be technical engineers, but rather people with problem-solving, critical thinking and communication skills. Job listings for prompt engineers showed salaries of $300,000 or more in 2023.
Ryan Bulkoski, head of the AI, data and analytics practice at executive recruitment firm Heidrick & Struggles, says upskilling employees and having leaders be better informed about AI are “critical” today because it will take time to build an “AI-educated workforce.”
“If a company says, ‘Oh I want someone who has five years of experience as an AI prompt engineer, guess what? It’s not in existence — that role only came up in the last 18 months,” he says.
That’s why becoming comfortable with chatbots should be on your 2024 to-do list, especially for knowledge workers who will be the “most exposed to change,” the job site Indeed.com found in a September report. It examined 55 million job postings and more than 2,600 skills to determine which jobs and skills had low, moderate and high exposure to generative AI disruption.
More-experienced workers might want to start that upskilling work sooner rather than later. Researchers at the University of Oxford found that older workers may be at a higher risk from AI-related job threats because they might not be as comfortable adopting new tech as their younger colleagues.
“When the pocket calculator came out, a lot of people thought that their jobs were going to be in danger because they calculated for a living,” MIT’s McAfee says. “It turns out we still need a lot of analysts and engineers and scientists and accountants — people who work with numbers. If they’re not working with a calculator or by now a spreadsheet, they’re really not going to be very employable anymore.”
A few ways you can play with gen AI today
Generative AI’s ability to have a natural language collaboration with humans puts it in a special class of technology — what researchers and economists call a general-purpose technology. That is, something that “can affect an entire economy, usually at a national or global level,” Wikipedia explains. “GPTs have the potential to drastically alter societies through their impact on pre-existing economic and social structures.”
Other such GPTs include electricity, the steam engine and the internet — things that become fundamental to society because they can affect the quality of life for everyone. (That GPT is different, by the way, from the one in ChatGPT, which stands for “generative pre-trained transformer.”)
You can engage with AI chatbots in many ways. Most tools are free, with a step up to a paid subscription plan if you want a more robust version that works faster, offers more security and/or allows you to create more content. There are caveats in using all these tools, especially when it comes to privacy. Google Bard, for instance, collects your conversations, while ChatGPT says it collects “personal information that is included in the input, file uploads, or feedback that you provide to our services.” Read the terms of service or check out privacy assessments from third parties like Common Sense Media.
“You should at least try [these tools] to get some idea beyond the news headline of what they can and can’t do,” said David Carr, a senior insights manager at Similarweb. “This is going to be a big part of how the internet changes and how our whole experience of work and computing changes over the next few years.”
A way with words: OpenAI’s chatbot is at the top of most people’s lists to try. A few months after its debut, actor Ryan Reynolds asked ChatGPT to write a TV commercial for his Mint Mobile wireless service and shared the result on YouTube, where it got nearly 2 million views. His take on the AI-generated ad? “Mildly terrifying but compelling.”
It’s not the only AI copilot able to answer questions, brainstorm ideas with you, summarize articles and meeting notes, translate text into different languages, compose emails and job descriptions, write jokes (apparently not very well) or help you figure out how to do something — like learn a new language.
ChatGPT will write entire essays, poems, business plans and more, but it can also answer your questions about writing, grammar and style.
There’s also Google Bard, Microsoft Bing (which is based on OpenAI’s technology), Anthropic’s Claude.ai, Perplexity.ai and YouChat. In November, people spent between five and eight minutes playing with these tools per visit, according to Similarweb’s Carr. And while ChatGPT leads in visits right now, followed by Bing with 1.3 billion, there were nearly half a billion visits to the other top sites that month.
What does that mean? Generative AI should now be considered a mainstream tech, Carr says. These tools are all “basically doing things that were impossible a couple of years ago.”
Turning words into images: While ChatGPT draws most of the attention, OpenAI first released a text-to-image generator called Dall-E in April 2022. You type in a text prompt, which turns into visual interpretations of your words — things like “portrait of a blue alien that is singing opera” or a “3D rendering of a bouldering wall made of Swiss cheese.”
Dall-E 3, whose name is a mashup of Pixar’s WALL-E robot and surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, isn’t the only text-to-image generator promising to produce your next masterpiece in seconds. Popular tools in this category include Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Shutterstock’s AI image generator, Canva Pro, Adobe Firefly, Craiyon, DeviantArt’s Dreamup and Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator, which is based on Dall-E.
Adobe’s Firefly website lets you create words in zany AI-generated font styles like “holographic snakeskin with small shiny scales,” “realistic tiger fur” or “black leather shiny plastic wrinkle.” The company’s free Adobe Express app is suited to flyers, posters, party invitations and quick animations for social media posts, says CNET’s Stephen Shankland. He’s been testing AI image tools and giving hard thought to how they’re causing people to rethink the truth behind photos.
Video and audio: It’s not just words and images getting an AI assist. You’ll find text-to-video converters, including Synthesia, Lumen5 and Meta’s Emu Video that are being used to reimagine how films, videos, GIFs and animations are created. There are text-to-audio generators, like ElevenLabs, Descript and Speechify, and text-to-music generators including Stable Audio and SongR. Google is testing a tool called Dream Track that lets you create music tracks for YouTube videos by cloning the voices of nine musicians — including John Legend, Demi Lovato and Sia — with their permission.
If you’re looking to experiment, CNET video producer Stephen Beacham created a step-by-step tutorial showing how to use ElevenLabs’ AI voice generator to clone your own voice.
You can probably think of lots of ways that cloning someone’s voice might be for nefarious purposes (Hi Grandma, can you send me some money?) President Joe Biden called out worries over AI voice cloning tech, telling reporters after signing an executive order that aims to put guardrails around the use of AI that someone can use a three-second clip of his voice to generate an entire fake conversation. “When the hell did I say that?” Biden joked after watching an AI deepfake of himself.
There are compelling potential use cases. Spotify is testing a voice translation feature that will use AI to translate podcasts into additional languages in the original podcaster’s voice.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams used an audio converter to deliver a public service message to city residents in 10 languages, although he got into trouble for not telling people he’d gotten an AI assist to make it sound as though he were speaking Mandarin.
His disclosure gaffe aside, Adams made a good point about using tech to reach audiences who have “historically been locked out” because translating messages into different languages might not be feasible due to time, resources or cost. Said Adams, “We are becoming more welcoming by utilizing tech to speak in a multitude of languages.”