First, they are programmed for specific tasks. (Examples OpenAI created include “Creative Writing Coach” and “Mocktail Mixologist,” a bot that suggests non-alcoholic drink recipes.) Second, bots can extract private data, such as a company’s internal human resources documents or a database of real estate listings. and incorporate that data into your answers. Third, if you allow them, bots can connect to other parts of your online life (your calendar, your to-do list, your Slack account) and perform actions using your credentials.
Does it sound scary? It is, if you ask some ai security researchers, who fear that giving bots more autonomy could lead to disaster. The Center for ai Safety, a nonprofit research organization, listed autonomous agents as one of its “ai/ai-risk” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>catastrophic risks of ai” this year, saying that “malicious actors could intentionally create rogue AIs with dangerous goals.”
But there is money to be made with ai assistants that can perform useful tasks for people, and corporate clients have been eager to train chatbots with their own data. There is also the argument that ai won’t be truly useful until it really understands its users: their communication styles, their likes and dislikes, what they watch and buy online.
So here we are, accelerating towards the era of the autonomous ai agent – fatalists be damned.
To be fair, OpenAI bots are not particularly dangerous. I got a demo of several GPTs during the company’s developer conference in San Francisco on Monday, and they mostly automated harmless tasks like creating children’s coloring pages or explaining the rules of card games.
Custom GPTs also can’t do much yet, beyond searching for documents and connecting to common applications. One demo I saw on Monday involved an OpenAI employee asking a GPT to find conflicting meetings on his Google calendar and send a Slack message to his boss. Another happened on stage when Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, created a “startup mentor” chatbot to give advice to aspiring founders, based on an uploaded file of a speech he had given years before.
