Unless you’ve been on a retreat in some far-flung location with no internet access for the past few months, chances are you’re well aware of how much hype and fear there’s been around ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI. Maybe you’ve seen articles about academics and teachers worrying that it’ll make cheating easier than ever. On the other side of the coin, you might have seen the articles evangelising all of ChatGPT’s potential applications.
Alternatively, you may have been tickled by some of the more esoteric examples of people using the tool. One user, for example, got it to write an instruction guide for removing peanut butter sandwiches from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible. Another asked it to write a song in the style of Nick Cave; the singer was less than enthused about the results.
But amidst all that hype and discussion, there hasn’t been nearly enough attention paid to the risks and rewards that AI tools like ChatGPT present in the cybersecurity arena.
Understanding ChatGPT
In order to get a clearer idea of what those risks and rewards look like, it’s important to get a better understanding of what ChatGPT is and what it’s capable of.
ChatGPT (now in its latest version, ChatGPT-4, released on March 14th, 2023) is part of a larger family of AI tools developed by the US-based company OpenAI. While it’s officially called a chatbot, that doesn’t quite cover its versatility. Trained using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques, it can do far more than most chatbots. As part of its responses, it can generate content based on all the information it was trained on. That information includes general knowledge as well as programming languages and code. As a result, it can, for instance, simulate an entire chat room; play games like tic-tac-toe; and simulate an ATM.
More importantly, for businesses and other large organisations, it can help improve businesses’ customer service through more personalised, accurate messaging. It can even write and debug computer programs. Some of those, and other, features mean that it could both be a cybersecurity ally and a threat.
