Depending on whom you ask, generative artificial intelligence is either all hype or one of the world's most influential technologies.
Since OpenAI released its generative AI tool, ChatGPT, in November 2022, interest in this technology has surged, and many firm leaders are wondering whether they need to get on board to avoid missing a great opportunity or steer clear altogether.
The answer might be somewhere in the middle, so let's get into what this technology is, where it's at, where it's going and what you need to know as you wade in.
What is generative AI?
Generative AI refers to machine learning models trained on vast data sets of text and images. It can generate new text and images in response to natural language prompts.
While ChatGPT tends to be the generative AI platform most people think of, there are several others, including Bing AI, Google Bard, DALL-E, StyleGAN by Nvidia, JukeDeck and Microsoft Copilot for Office.
You've likely interacted with AI without realizing it, such as when you use a voice assistant like Siri or Alexa to find a restaurant, tell you the name of a song or interact with a service chatbot when navigating a website. While AI has been around for years, ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are popular right now because they're some of the first AI technologies to be made available to the public in a way people can understand.
You don't need to know how to code to use it — you can ask it to create an email to a client, a resignation letter, or a list of 10 potential titles for a blog post, and it will generate outputs in a way humans can understand.
Uses for generative AI
Generative AI tools are finding their way into all sorts of professions today and changing how people get work done.
In the creative industries, designers and artists use AI to generate new ideas. For example, visual artists might use these tools to create unique images.
Marketing professionals are leveraging generative AI for content creation, automating the generation of social media posts, blog headlines, website copy and even email marketing campaigns.
In the tech industry, developers use AI for coding, where the AI suggests code snippets or offers debugging solutions, helping them improve productivity.
Whether it's creativity, productivity or analytical tasks, generative AI is increasingly becoming a powerful tool professionals are learning to harness in their work.
Concerns with generative AI
While the potential of generative AI is exciting, it's essential to approach this new technology with a balanced perspective. As with many emerging technologies, generative AI comes with its own set of concerns. Here are some of the major ones that need to be considered:
- Ethical implications. Generative AI's ability to create content based on pre-existing works introduces a new arena of copyright infringement and plagiarism issues.
- Fake content and misinformation. Generative AI can produce content that may mislead or deceive. In the wrong hands, it can generate deepfakes — highly realistic and manipulated media that can distort the truth and spread misinformation.
- Data protection and privacy. Generative AI platforms collect data generated during user interactions. This data collection helps improve the system's performance and training models. This poses significant data protection and privacy concerns if users input personal data, such as client names, financial information, etc.
- Biases and discrimination. AI can perpetuate and even amplify existing societal biases since it's trained on data created by humans.
- Intellectual property protection. AI tools can scrape content from your website and use this as input data to create new outputs. This technology can effectively take your original content, analyze it and generate similar content that retains the style and theme of your intellectual property.
Leveraging AI in your firm
Whether we choose to fully embrace it or view it with a degree of skepticism, generative AI is here, and it forms an integral part of our evolving digital landscape. As CPAs, it's our job to understand this technology so we can help our clients understand and navigate it.
Here are two things you should discuss with other leaders in your firm right now:
- How can we leverage AI in the firm today? We see firms using it to create content, training resources, emails and more. There are opportunities to let AI automate some time-consuming tasks, giving you more time to focus on client relationships.
- What policies do we need to put in place around AI? Whether sanctioned or not, people are using these tools. To protect your firm and clients, it's essential to create policies for using AI to ensure ethical use and keep your data secure.
Generative AI, while full of potential, is ultimately just another tool in our outsourcing and automation toolbox. We can use it to amplify human creativity and drive efficiency but it's essential to remember that AI, like any tool, must be used wisely and ethically. The future is not about AI replacing humans but about AI augmenting human potential.
