As millions of businesses get curious about ChatGPT, they’re warning their employees not to put corporate secrets into the artificial intelligence bot.
Walmart, Amazon and other companies don't trust ChatGBT because its terms and conditions don't exactly say how the information will be used, according to Axios.
The Wall Street Journal reports JPMorgan Chase & Co and Verizon have gone a step further, blocking access for their workers.
But once employees and corporate executives understand the risks, there are advantages to using ChatGPT and other programs like Google's Bard and Meta/Facebook's BlenderBot, experts say.
A Cincinnati workshop to revolutionize business with ChatGPT
Rob Siegmann is COO of Total Wealth Planning, a boutique investment management firm in Blue Ash. He attended a March 7 ChatGPT seminar at TechSolve and says as a small company in a very competitive industry, he's always looking for an advantage.
"One example that was displayed was to upload your employee handbook and create an AI responder bot that employees could ask a question about PTO or bereavement or other benefits that you might offer," Siegmann says. "Instead of searching through, say, a 39-page PDF, they're getting an instant response. So, me as the HR compliance person, that's going to save me a lot of time and answering questions about the benefits."
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Siegmann is looking forward to finding other ways it could save the company time.
For Big Orange Marketing, one of the event's sponsors, CEO Margee Moore became even more interested in artificial intelligence bots after one of her clients — a landscaping firm — asked, what are you going to do with this?
"What ChatGPT can really help you do is with that starter copy, and with iterations of copy. It can just really help you do more, faster," Moore says. "You need to be aware and make sure it's not plagiarism; you have to make sure it's your voice. So, you just want to make sure you continue to revise and refine."
Co-sponsor Intrust IT CEO Tim Rettig recently attended an event like this one in Las Vegas and says it's important to bring the topic to Cincinnati.
"When I started my company in the early '90s, that's right when the internet started to take off. So I had very similar events back in the early '90s, trying to explain to people how they're going to want to connect their home computer and their business to the internet, set up a website, get email — all those types of things back then," says Rettig.
Putting on this workshop to teach about ChatGPT reminds him of that. Rettig says there's already anecdotal evidence of companies reducing staff and changing the way they do business because of this technology. Panel discussions addressed some of those sticky subjects.
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Intrust IT is already using ChatGPT to help employees troubleshoot computer problems and answer customer emails, suggesting, "Hey we've seen this before; you might want to try this." Or if three or four different clients are contacting Intrust IT at once, ChatGPT can combine the data and start seeing patterns to solve the problem.
Intrust's Dave Hatter encourages everyone to try ChatGPT and other programs like it, but have your tin foil hat on. "You know, we have already seen a cybercrime epidemic. I think these tools are only going to accelerate that."
He warns anything you get — texts, emails, voice or video messages — can be spoofed and you have to be skeptical.
