With such great benefits, why do many companies still ban ChatGPT?

Enter ChatGPT - an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that can perform any text-based task given to it. In other words, ChatGPT can code faster and even more accurately than humans. The app can also perform purely artistic tasks like writing poetry or song lyrics.

It is these outstanding advantages that have made ChatGPT immediately accepted by many office workers to create PowerPoint presentations and write professional emails as well as generate code sequences for automated tasks.

Surveys show that ChatGPT has been widely adopted by employees and has helped them do their jobs more efficiently. According to a January survey by Fishbowl, more than 40% of nearly 12,000 employees at companies said they use ChatGPT or other AI tools at work.

World - With such benefits, why do many companies still ban ChatGPT? — GPT-4 is a more powerful language version of ChatGPT. (Image: Getty Images).

ChatGPT is still banned in many places.

However, many businesses and organizations large and small across industries are starting to discuss when it is appropriate and inappropriate to use AI to communicate, evaluate employee performance, and create solutions to get work done faster.

Several major companies, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Verizon Communications, have blocked access to ChatGPT. Others have offered alternative tools. Amazon, for example, requires its engineers to use an internal AI tool called CodeWhisperer.

Northrop Grumman Corporation, an aerospace and defense contractor, has also banned the use of ChatGPT, saying it will not allow the sharing of company or customer data on external platforms until those tools are fully tested.

In addition to privacy and trade secret concerns, many companies have their own issues with ChatGPT.

For example, Jamie Buckley, director of LexisNexis Legal and Professional - a leading group providing solutions related to financial crime prevention, anti-money laundering and risk management, said that although ChatGPT supports lawyers' work a lot, including summarizing case law, many law firms have issued new policies restricting lawyers from entering proprietary information into the ChatGPT platform and prohibiting lawyers from sharing unedited AI-generated text with clients as legal advice.

World - With such benefits, why do many companies still ban ChatGPT? (Image 2). — Many companies have introduced regulations prohibiting or restricting employees from using ChatGPT. (Photo: Getty Images).

The explosion in the use of ChatGPT in the workplace has led companies to look for ways to monitor and regulate the AI tool.

Recently, on March 31, Italian authorities issued a temporary ban on the ChatGPT application, effective immediately, due to privacy concerns. At the same time, Italy also said it would open an investigation into how OpenAI uses data. This is the first country in the world to ban ChatGPT.

Under the ban, OpenAI will be banned from using Italian users' data until ChatGPT "respects privacy regulations."

Italy's data protection authority said users lacked understanding of how ChatGPT collects and processes their data, and a privacy breach was reported on March 20.

The agency also expressed concern that OpenAI lacked a mechanism to verify the age of users, which “could leave children vulnerable to receiving age-inappropriate feedback.”

ChatGPT in sight

World - With such benefits, why do many companies still ban ChatGPT? (Image 3). — Billionaire Elon Musk. (Photo: Bloomberg).

Several prominent names in the tech world have recently called on AI labs to halt training for their most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Billionaire Elon Musk is one of dozens of tech company leaders, researchers and professors who have signed the petition.

The petition comes just two weeks after OpenAI, the US company behind ChatGPT, released GPT-4, a much more powerful version of the technology that powers the ChatGPT chatbot. In previous tests and demos, GPT-4 showed that it could draft lawsuits, pass standardized tests, and build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch.

In the petition, the tech leaders say the AI training pause should be extended to AI systems “more robust than GPT-4,” and call on independent experts to use the pause to work together to develop and deploy a common set of protocols for safe AI tools.

Yongkang (WSJ, CNN)

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