From school bans to Sam Altman drama: the big developments in AI in 2023
Al Jazeera
The past year showcased the hopes and fears around AI as transformative technology went mainstream.
The artificial intelligence (AI) industry began 2023 with a bang as schools and universities struggled with students using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help them with homework and essay writing.
Less than a week into the year, New York City Public Schools banned ChatGPT – released weeks earlier to enormous fanfare – a move that would set the stage for much of the discussion around generative AI in 2023.
As the buzz grew around Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and rivals like Google’s Bard AI, Baidu’s Ernie Chatbot and Meta’s LLaMA, so did questions about how to handle a powerful new technology that had become accessible to the public overnight.
While AI-generated images, music, videos and computer code created by platforms such as Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion or OpenAI’s DALL-E opened up exciting new possibilities, they also fuelled concerns about misinformation, targeted harassment and copyright infringement.
In March, a group of more than 1,000 signatories, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, called for a pause in the development of more advanced AI in light of its “profound risks to society and humanity”.
