Ethical ChatGPT: Concerns, Challenges, and Commandments

TL;DR

This paper surveys ethical concerns surrounding ChatGPT, including bias, privacy, transparency, abuse, and authorship, and identifies key challenges for safe deployment. It describes how the two-phase training of large language models on extensive internet data contributes to these issues. It then proposes stakeholder-specific commandments and practical guidelines for researchers, developers, users, regulators, and ethicists to promote responsible use. The work emphasizes the need for fact-checking, justification of responses, and domain-knowledge grounding to improve trust and inform policy and digital literacy efforts.

Abstract

Large language models, e.g. ChatGPT are currently contributing enormously to make artificial intelligence even more popular, especially among the general population. However, such chatbot models were developed as tools to support natural language communication between humans. Problematically, it is very much a ``statistical correlation machine" (correlation instead of causality) and there are indeed ethical concerns associated with the use of AI language models such as ChatGPT, such as Bias, Privacy, and Abuse. This paper highlights specific ethical concerns on ChatGPT and articulates key challenges when ChatGPT is used in various applications. Practical commandments for different stakeholders of ChatGPT are also proposed that can serve as checklist guidelines for those applying ChatGPT in their applications. These commandment examples are expected to motivate the ethical use of ChatGPT.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Examples of ethical concerns on ChatGPT
• Figure 2: Two main steps in building ChatGPT (adapted from openai_2023)