The AI-language model ChatGPT gained millions of users in just a few months. An impressive achievement, and one that hasn’t gone unnoticed. Initially, ChatGPT was mainly used for personal tasks. But it didn’t take long before people discovered its potential for work-related projects. This rapid development is cheered on by many, but critics worry about the pace of the changes and the potential impact on business.
Whether you’re a ChatGPT fan, critic, or something in between, now is the time to think about a company policy for the use of ChatGPT. It’s the only way to guarantee that AI is used ethically and effectively in your workplace, giving employees direction on the responsible and legally safe use of the tool.
What ChatGPT is already used for
Although originally designed as a chatbot to converse with, you can also use ChatGPT for a series of other language-related tasks. In business, people use it to:
- write content or code
- summarize reports
- generate ideas
- screen resumes and motivational letters
- come up with interview questions
- analyze business trends.
What are the risks of ChatGPT for your organization?
Using ChatGPT in business is not without risks. There are limitations you have to consider when you use it in business:
Quality. The results ChatGPT produces aren’t always accurate. Sometimes facts, calculations or other data are incorrect. Therefore you always need to carefully check that what is written reflects the truth.
Up to date. ChatGPT isn’t always aware of the most recent events. Most users will encounter that it doesn’t know about things that happened after 2021.Therefore, the information it produces can be outdated. Only if you use the paid version of ChatGPT-4 there is a possibility that you were recently invited to use beta features. These include a feature where ChatGPT browses the internet for information. This information is up to date.
- Monitoring. How are you going to monitor how your employees use ChatGPT and when? To ensure the quality of work, you need to know if ChatGPT has been used.
- Contracts and privacy. There are contractual risks when using ChatGPT, especially when it comes to sharing the confidential information of customers or clients. ChatGPT is often considered as a third party that you cannot share this information with. In other words, ChatGPT is not GDPR compliant.
- Intellectual property. When you write a text, the copyright is yours. But what if ChatGPT writes a piece of content for you? Where did it get the information from to write the text? Was copyright violated here? And who owns the content that ChatGPT writes?
- Bias. What if the content ChatGPT produces has a more masculine tone of voice? Or what if it excludes older people? Then the text contains bias that you have to deal with. Because bias can be difficult to spot, you can use the text optimizer on our platform for text improvement to check the content for bias.
How can you deal with these risks?
There are a few things you can incorporate into a company policy for ChatGPT, Text Generation or the use of AI. These can help you limit the consequences of the risks we mentioned above. Think about:
- Clear guidelines. Make sure employees know which information they can enter into ChatGPT.
- Labeling. Give content written by ChatGPT a clear label, so everyone knows it comes from the AI-language model.
- Policy. A policy gives insight into who is responsible if something goes wrong. Should the employee be held accountable, or will someone be designated as AI manager?
- Incident response plan. Should something go wrong, it’s important to have a plan ready detailing how you’re going to respond. It’s the best way to limit the possible damage.
- Transparency. Discuss how transparent you want to be about the use of ChatGPT towards clients and customers.
- Training. You could think about training employees according to the policy. What is expected to be the correct use of ChatGPT in your company?
A clear policy helps you benefit from AI
ChatGPT and other AI tools have great potential. They increase employee productivity partly by fully performing time-consuming tasks, leaving employees with more time to focus on other things. But since there are risks involved in the use of AI, a clear company policy is a must. When the rules and regulations are clear, you can harness the full potential of AI, while keeping the possible risks in check.