Digital assistants have existed for years; after all, Siri debuted on the iPhone 4S in 2011. But early voice-enabled helpers were initially limited in their functionality, sometimes struggling to produce helpful answers even under ideal circumstances. The new wave of digital agents that began to crop up in late 2022 and 2023, however, can effortlessly do everything from creating recipes to summing up your emails to even writing social media captions for your photos.Â
Virtual helpers took a leap forward this year thanks to the rise of generative AI, or AI that can create content based on prompts after being trained on data. OpenAI dazzled the world with ChatGPT roughly one year ago, and tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta nimbly wove generative AI into their chatbots, search engines and digital assistants throughout 2023.
But the new cohort of high-tech digital butlers also requires trust in Big Tech, a sizable ask after data breaches, controversies like the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal and investigations into privacy practices have shaken our faith in tech companies. The past 10 years have raised big questions from regulators and the general public about how companies use the stream of data we feed them. Reaping the benefits of new AI could mean getting even more personal with the tech services we use every day.
In some ways, chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google Bard are just evolutions of how digital services already operate. Companies like Google parent Alphabet, Meta and Amazon already crunch data about our internet browsing habits to provide personalized content, ads and recommendations. New AI tools may not require more personal data, but it’s the new ways these tools connect the dots between different types of personal data, like our emails and texts, that raise fresh privacy concerns. Â
“We can see how the pieces are put together now with these tools,” said Matthew Butkovic, technical director for the CERT…
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