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8 BIG PROBLEMS WITH OPENAI'S CHATGPT

By Garling Wu
Updated 1 day ago


OpenAI's new chatbot has garnered attention for its impressive answers, but how
much of it is believable? Let's explore the darker side of ChatGPT.


Readers like you help support MUO. When you make a purchase using links on our
site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Read More.

ChatGPT is a powerful AI chatbot that is quick to impress, yet plenty of people
have pointed out that it has some serious pitfalls.

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From security breaches to incorrect answers to the undisclosed data it was
trained on, there are plenty of concerns about the AI-powered chatbot. Yet, the
technology is already being incorporated into apps and used by millions, from
students to company employees.



With no sign of AI development slowing down, the problems with ChatGPT are even
more important to understand. With ChatGPT set to change our future, here are
some of the biggest issues.


WHAT IS CHATGPT?

ChatGPT is a large language model designed to produce natural human language.
Much like conversing with someone, you can talk to ChatGPT, and it will remember
things you have said in the past while also being capable of correcting itself
when challenged.



It was trained on all sorts of text from the internet, such as Wikipedia, blog
posts, books, and academic articles. Alongside responding to you in a human-like
way, it can recall information about our present-day world and pull up
historical information from our past.

Learning how to use ChatGPT is simple, and it's equally easy to be fooled into
thinking that the AI system performs without any trouble. However, since its
release, key problems have emerged around privacy, security, and its wider
impact on people's lives, from jobs to education.





1. SECURITY THREATS AND PRIVACY CONCERNS

There are plenty of things that you must not share with AI chatbots, and for
good reason. Writing about your financial details or confidential workplace
information comes with a risk. OpenAI retains your chat history on its servers
and may share this data with a select number of third-party groups.

In addition, leaving your data in the safety of OpenAI has proved to be a
problem. In March 2023, a security breach meant some users on ChatGPT saw
conversation headings in the sidebar that didn't belong to them. Accidentally
sharing users' chat histories is a serious concern for any tech company, but
it's especially bad considering how many people use the popular chatbot.

As reported by Reuters, ChatGPT had 100 million monthly active users in January
2023 alone. While the bug that caused the breach was quickly patched, Italy
banned ChatGPT and demanded it stop processing Italian users' data.




The watchdog organization suspected that European privacy regulations were being
breached. After investigating the issue, it requested that OpenAI meet several
demands to reinstate the chatbot.

OpenAI eventually resolved the issue with regulators by making several
significant changes. For a start, an age restriction was added, limiting the use
of the app to people 18+ or 13+ with guardian permission. It also made its
Privacy Policy more visible and provided an opt-out Google form for users to
exclude their data from its training or delete ChatGPT history entirely.

These changes are a great start, but the improvements should be extended to all
ChatGPT users.

You might not think that you would share your personal details so easily, but
we're all susceptible to a slip of the tongue, and a good example of this is how
a Samsung employee shared company information with ChatGPT.




2. CONCERNS OVER CHATGPT TRAINING AND PRIVACY ISSUES

Following the massively popular launch of ChatGPT, critics have questioned how
OpenAI trained its model in the first place.



Even with improved changes to OpenAI's privacy policies following a data breach,
it may not be enough to satisfy the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),
the data protection law that covers Europe. As TechCrunch reports:

> It is not clear whether Italians’ personal data that was used to train its GPT
> model historically, i.e. when it scraped public data off the Internet, was
> processed with a valid lawful basis — or, indeed, whether data used to train
> models previously will or can be deleted if users request their data deleted
> now.

OpenAI likely scooped up personal information when it first trained ChatGPT.
While the laws in the United States are less definitive, European data laws
protect personal data, whether they post that info publicly or privately.

Similar arguments against ChatGPT training data are voiced by artists who say
they never consented to their work being used to train an AI model. At the same
time, Getty Images has sued Stability.AI for using copyrighted images to train
its AI models.



Unless OpenAI publishes its training data, the lack of transparency makes it
difficult to know whether it was done lawfully. We don't know the details about
how ChatGPT is trained, what data was used, where the data comes from, or what
the system's architecture looks like in detail.




3. CHATGPT GENERATES WRONG ANSWERS



It fails at basic math, can't seem to answer simple logic questions, and will
even go as far as to argue completely incorrect facts. As people across social
media will attest, ChatGPT can get it wrong multiple times.

OpenAI knows about this limitation, writing that: "ChatGPT sometimes writes
plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers." This "hallucination"
of fact and fiction, as it's been referred to, is especially dangerous regarding
things like medical advice or getting the facts right on key historical events.



ChatGPT initially didn't use the internet to locate answers, unlike other AI
assistants like Siri or Alexa you may be familiar with. Instead, it constructed
an answer word by word, selecting the most likely "token" that should come next
based on its training. In other words, ChatGPT arrives at an answer by making a
series of probable guesses, which is part of why it can argue wrong answers as
if they were completely true.

In March 2023, ChatGPT was hooked up to the internet but quickly disconnected
again. OpenAI didn't reveal too much information, but to say that "ChatGPT
Browse beta can occasionally display content in ways we don't want."

The Search with Bing feature piggybacked off Microsoft's Bing-AI tool, which has
equally proved that it's not quite ready to answer your questions correctly.
When asked to describe the picture in a URL, it should admit it can't complete
the request. Instead, Bing described in great detail a red and yellow macaw—the
URL, in fact, showed an image of a man sitting.




You can see more hilarious hallucinations in our comparison between ChatGPT vs.
Microsoft Bing AI vs. Google Bard. It's not hard to imagine people using ChatGPT
to get quick facts and information, expecting those results to be true. But so
far, ChatGPT can't get it right, and teaming up with an equally inaccurate Bing
search engine only made things worse.




4. CHATGPT HAS BIAS BAKED INTO ITS SYSTEM

ChatGPT was trained on the collective writing of humans across the world, past
and present. Unfortunately, this means that the same biases in the real world
can also appear in the model.

ChatGPT has been shown to produce some terrible answers that discriminate
against gender, race, and minority groups, which the company is trying to
mitigate.

One way to explain this issue is to point to the data as the problem, blaming
humanity for the biases embedded in the internet and beyond. But part of the
responsibility also lies with OpenAI, whose researchers and developers select
the data used to train ChatGPT.



Once again, OpenAI knows this is an issue and has said it's addressing "biased
behavior" by collecting feedback from users and encouraging them to flag ChatGPT
outputs that are bad, offensive, or simply incorrect.

With the potential to cause harm to people, you could argue that ChatGPT
shouldn't have been released to the public before these problems were studied
and resolved. But a race to be the first company to create the most powerful AI
model might have been enough for OpenAI to throw caution to the wind.

By contrast, a similar AI chatbot called Sparrow—owned by Google's parent
company, Alphabet—was released in September 2022. However, it was purposely kept
behind closed doors because of similar safety concerns. Around the same time,
Facebook released an AI language model called Galactica, intended to help with
academic research. However, it was rapidly recalled after many people criticized
it for outputting wrong and biased results related to scientific research.





5. CHATGPT MIGHT TAKE JOBS FROM HUMANS



The dust has yet to settle after the rapid development and deployment of
ChatGPT, but that hasn't stopped the underlying technology from being stitched
into several commercial apps. Among the apps that have integrated GPT-4 are
Duolingo and Khan Academy.

The former is a language learning app, while the latter is a diverse educational
learning tool. Both offer what is essentially an AI tutor, either in the form of
an AI-powered character that you can talk to in the language you are learning.
Or as an AI tutor that can give you tailored feedback on your learning.

This could be just the beginning of AI holding human jobs. The types of jobs
most at risk of from AI include graphic design, writing, and accounting. When it
was announced that a later version of ChatGPT passed the bar exam, the final
hurdle for a person to become a lawyer, it became even more plausible that AI
could change the workforce in the near future.



As reported by The Guardian, Education companies posted huge losses on the
London and New York stock exchanges, highlighting the disruption AI is causing
to some markets as little as six months after ChatGPT was launched.

Technological advancements have always resulted in jobs being lost, but the
speed of AI advancements means multiple industries are facing rapid change. A
huge cross-section of human jobs are seeing AI filtering into the workplace.
Some jobs may find menial tasks being completed with the help of AI tools, while
other positions may cease to exist in the future.




6. CHATGPT IS CHALLENGING EDUCATION

You can ask ChatGPT to proofread your writing or point out how to improve a
paragraph. Or you can remove yourself from the equation entirely and ask ChatGPT
to do all the writing for you.

Teachers have experimented with feeding English assignments to ChatGPT and have
received answers that are better than what many of their students could do. From
writing cover letters to describing major themes in a famous work of literature,
ChatGPT can do it all without hesitation.




That begs the question: if ChatGPT can write for us, will students need to learn
this skill in the future? It might seem like an existential question, but since
students have started using ChatGPT to help write their essays, educators will
soon have to face reality.

Unsurprisingly, students are already experimenting with AI. The Stanford Daily
reports that early surveys show a significant number of students have used AI to
assist with assignments and exams.

In the short term, schools and universities are updating their policies and
ruling whether students can or cannot use AI to help them with an assignment.
It's not only English-based subjects that are at risk either; ChatGPT can help
with any task involving brainstorming, summarizing, or drawing analytical
conclusions.





7. CHATGPT CAN CAUSE REAL-WORLD HARM

It wasn't long before someone tried to jailbreak ChatGPT, resulting in an AI
model that could bypass OpenAI's guard rails meant to prevent it from generating
offensive and dangerous text.

A group of users on the ChatGPT Reddit group named their unrestricted AI model
Dan, short for "Do Anything Now." Sadly, doing whatever you like has led to
hackers ramping up online scams. Hackers have also been seen selling rule-less
ChatGPT services that create malware and produce phishing emails, with mixed
results on the AI-created malware.

Trying to spot a phishing email designed to extract sensitive details from you
is far more difficult now with AI-generated text. Grammatical errors, which used
to be an obvious red flag, are limited with ChatGPT, which can fluently write
all kinds of text, from essays to poems and, of course, dodgy emails.




The rate at which ChatGPT can produce information has already caused problems
for Stack Exchange, a website dedicated to providing correct answers to everyday
questions. Soon after ChatGPT was released, users flooded the site with answers
they asked ChatGPT to generate.

Without enough human volunteers to sort through the backlog, it would be
impossible to maintain a high level of quality answers. Not to mention, many of
the answers were incorrect. To avoid the website being damaged, a ban was placed
on all answers generated using ChatGPT.

The spread of fake information is a serious concern, too. The scale at which
ChatGPT can produce text, coupled with the ability to make even incorrect
information sound convincingly right, makes everything on the internet
questionable. It's a critical combination that amplifies the dangers of deepfake
technology.




8. OPENAI HOLDS ALL THE POWER

With great power comes great responsibility, and OpenAI holds a fair share of
it. It's one of the first AI companies to truly shake up the world with not one
but multiple generative AI models, including Dall-E 2, GPT-3, and GPT-4.



As a private company, OpenAI selects the data used to train ChatGPT and chooses
how fast it rolls out new developments. Despite experts warning of the dangers
posed by AI, OpenAI isn't showing signs of slowing down.

On the contrary, the popularity of ChatGPT has spurred a race between big tech
companies competing to launch the next big AI model; among them are Microsoft's
Bing AI and Google's Bard. Fearing that rapid development will lead to serious
safety problems, a letter was penned by tech leaders worldwide asking for
development to be delayed.



While OpenAI considers safety a high priority, there is a lot that we don't know
about how the models themselves work, for better or worse. At the end of the
day, the only choice we have is to unquestioningly trust that OpenAI will
research, develop, and use ChatGPT responsibly.



Whether we agree with its methods or not, it's worth remembering that OpenAI is
a private company that will continue developing ChatGPT according to its own
goals and ethical standards.




TACKLING AI'S BIGGEST PROBLEMS

There is a lot to be excited about with ChatGPT, but beyond its immediate uses,
there are some serious problems.

OpenAI admits that ChatGPT can produce harmful and biased answers, hoping to
mitigate the problem by gathering user feedback. But its ability to produce
convincing text, even when the facts aren't true, can easily be used by bad
actors.

Privacy and security breaches have already shown that OpenAI's system can be
vulnerable, putting users' personal data at risk. Adding to the trouble, people
are jailbreaking ChatGPT and using the unrestricted version to produce malware
and scams on a scale we haven't seen before.

Threats to jobs and the potential to disrupt education are a few more problems
that are piling up. With brand-new technology, it's difficult to predict what
problems will arise in the future, but unfortunately, we don't have to look very
far. ChatGPT has produced its fair share of challenges for us to deal with in
the present.



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About The Author
Garling Wu • Staff Writer for Creative (147 Articles Published)


Garling has a Master's in Music and over a decade of experience working with
creative technologies. She writes about the benefits and pitfalls of AI and art,
alongside practical guides for film, photography, and audio production. An avid
reader of longform articles and deep-dives into Wikipedia, she's fascinated with
learning new ideas.


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