Are We Experiencing AI Misuse in the Workplace?
Open AI opens their search to all users, as ChatGPT search function became available to FREE subscribers, previously this was only a feature available to paid subscribers.
As OpenAI continue to challenge Google’s dominance in web searches, it’s believed that users will be able to make ChatGPT Search their default search engine on web browsers, and will also be able to conduct searches using voice commands.
In their December announcement, ChatGPT said all logged-in users can now get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for.
While there might be fears of misinformation being fed to users, Open AI has stated that ChatGPT search promises to better highlight and attribute information from trustworthy news sources, benefiting audiences while expanding the reach of publishers like ourselves who produce premium journalism. Chats will now include links to sources, such as news articles or blog posts – so users can learn more about where the information they’ve been fed has come from.
This comes about as Google has added more AI features to its Google Search functionality over the last few months. With Gemini, Google’s generative AI chatbot, is set to “change Google’s search engine profoundly” in 2025.
While all these changes are exciting many, it is also making many business leaders nervous about how AI use is going to be policed in the workforce. While AI undoubtedly has its benefits, there are concerns over peoples skillsets diminishing as they develop an overreliance on AI.
One 27-year-old researcher told the newspaper he has been using ChatGPT to write code as part of an effort to keep up with his colleagues. “Part of it was sheer laziness,” he said. “Part of it was genuinely believing it could make my work better and more accurate.”
Companies including Apple, Samsung, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America prohibited employees from using ChatGPT in 2023, primarily due to data privacy concerns.
However as AI models have become more popular and more powerful and are increasingly seen as key to staying competitive in crowded industries, business leaders are becoming convinced that such prohibitive policies are not a sustainable solution.
While all businesses are likely going to adopt AI in some format if they haven’t already, ultimately they need to consider the following:
- Responsible AI use at work
- Properly prepared and reliable data
- Accessing the right tools and talent
- Clear expectations around AI use in the workplace
- Organisational alignment and business value
Ultimately, many employees still don’t properly understand AI, Chatbots or how to use them correctly. Employees need to be educated on the level of information they are allowed to feed Chatbots from a business safety and GDPR perspective. If businesses are happy with employees using tools such as Chat GPT, then the need to understand the basics of prompting is essential to using AI as a tool while still producing quality work.
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