DoNotPay’s Browser isn’t the only person who sees ChatGPT and the technology behind it as a way to automate persuasion. A doctor posted a video on Twitter showing how the bot could write a letter to help convince an insurer to pay for a certain procedure, even citing scientific literature, albeit with questionable accuracy.
In the long run, large companies can adopt the technology and create chatbots designed to handle customer questions and complaints, or sell them new products. Browder says he is already in an “arms race” with companies using automated tools that try to thwart his services. He expects this to become stronger now, but claims DoNotPay can stay ahead of the pack. “I think the future of this is bots just talking to each other to get the optimal result,” says Browder.
Jonas Kaiser, an assistant professor at Suffolk University in Boston who studies online disinformation and algorithmic recommendations, says the cost of creating large language models — often tens of millions of dollars — means big companies can have an edge. “Companies can and probably will train the language model for some desired outcome, such as a customer dropping their complaint or signing a new contract,” he says.
Some companies are already using AI language models to help salespeople hone their pitches. Eilon Reshef, co-founder and chief product officer at Gong, a company that uses AI to optimize sales, sees a lot of potential in ChatGPT.
Gong uses AI to analyze the text of sales pitches used during phone calls and in writing and to provide feedback to sellers. Reshef says language generators’ propensity to fabricate means a person still has to supervise the technology, and systems that invent too freely won’t be trusted by vendors. But he says a tool like ChatGPT can be trained with knowledge of a particular company or person to help improve a pitch. “If the AI has context about who you’re communicating with and why, it can help generate an email,” says Reshef.
On that view, language software helps people in the workplace, but ChatGPT has led to speculation about how it might displace people from certain types of office work. David Autor, an economist at MIT who studies the impact of AI on labor, says it’s too early to say whether this new generation of AI technology will augment or replace human work. But he sees great potential for disruption in both workplaces, through commercial adaptations of ChatGPT-like systems, and in wider society, through malicious use. “It’s going to do all kinds of damage,” says Autor. “The opportunities for scams or fraud or gaming systems are just amazing.”
