On February 06, 2023, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum tweeted instructions for the relevant authorities to submit an urgent study to the Council of Ministers on the best way for the government to benefit from new artificial intelligence technologies, specifically Chat GPT and its future effects on the educational, health, media and other sectors, in addition to how the government can deal positively and safely with these technologies.
This tweet made the interest of the UAE’s wise leadership in information technology and its impact on various sectors quite clear.
Furthermore, it showed awareness and a profound understanding of the international reality and the potential challenges posed by this technology, which require study and analysis to benefit from it.
Per these explicit directives from His Highness to study the Chat GPT program to benefit from it in various fields, many government sectors have experimented with this program.
His Excellency Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, announced that the authority is working to enrich its services with Chat GPT technology with the support of Microsoft so that it can benefit from it in its various internal and external services, making the Authority the first public service institution in the world and the first government institution in the United Arab Emirates to use this new technology.
It didn’t take long for the UAE’s Ministry of Education to follow suit, and His Excellency Dr Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of Education, announced that students would be allowed to use this advanced technology, and conduct a comprehensive study of the Emirati educational curriculum, in accordance with the new technological developments brought about by this program, especially since education in the country is on the verge of a fundamental revolution.
These moves taken by some government institutions constitute a first step on the path towards the use of the Chat GPT program by other bodies and institutions in a way that serves the state’s directions in this field and achieves the goals of these sectors and strengthens their capabilities, in line with the state’s sheikhs and leaders’ future vision.
What is Chat GPT and how does it work?
Chat GPT is a dialogue-based AI chatbot capable of understanding natural human language and generating impressively accurate human-like texts.
It is a linguistic model that relies mainly on artificial intelligence, which has been trained in different languages to enable it to create new texts and respond to questions and conversations in a human-like manner, as it mainly relies on deep learning technology to better understand texts and answer questions, and it can be used in various fields such as translation, customer services, education, health, e-commerce and more.
This program works by analyzing texts, learning from them, and using this information to create new texts and respond to various questions.
Furthermore, it can be used to create messages, emails, instant messaging, content generation, machine translation, and more.
Chat GPT is a modern and innovative technology in the field of artificial intelligence that is increasingly being used in various fields.
This new program is trained using artificial intelligence technology to generate texts, relying on analyzing and understanding natural language through the study of the relationships between words in the text.
Therefore, Chat GPT technology relies on natural language processing in a way similar to the way the human brain does, where the text is analyzed into small units, such as words and sentences, before determining the relationships between these units, so that Chat GPT can then be trained on a large scale using the language data available online, allowing it to learn more complex relationships between words and generating new texts based on previously learned linguistic patterns within a previously known and ordered numerical context.
When text is entered into chat GPT, the model uses its prior knowledge to generate a new text based on the context and meaning, which means it can be used to generate text in many applications, such as generating letters or automatic replies in a chatbot.
To achieve this high consistency, the original GPT-3 model was trained on a dataset of more than 8 million web pages, enabling it to consistently generate text in a variety of languages and formats.
Chat GPT is a variant of the GPT paradigm that was designed specifically for use in chatbots and conversational AI systems.
This model is trained on a large data set of chat conversations and can generate appropriate, consistent and even highly relevant responses.
Aside from generating responses, the program can be used for tasks such as translating, summarizing text, writing computer code, and answering questions.
Overall, it constitutes a powerful tool for building chatbots and other conversational AI systems that can interact with users naturally and consistently.
This program is the latest chatbot produced by OpenAI, an independent research organization founded in late 2015 by Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, along with other investors.
The genie reading your military thoughts
Chat GPT can be used to perform various tasks such as text generation, translation and understanding questions, as well as answering questions and providing assistance to the user on his own.
Furthermore, it can admit errors, challenge verbal structures, and reject inappropriate requests.
Real-life applications of Chat GPT can include creating content for websites and responding to customers’ inquiries, providing recommendations, and creating automated chatbots.
In the future, this program will provide a bot that can do the work for you or even discover new knowledge for you.
Today, after years of development, this program can collect a data set of military reports, texts, and information related to a specific topic, and then use it to automatically create summaries of the information contained in the reports or to identify key pieces of information that may not be immediately apparent.
This key feature allows for text summarization and analysis of large data sets, such as news articles, social media posts, or government documents concisely and consistently, to quickly identify important information and trends and develop accurate knowledge of the enemy, whether it be people, organizations, or locations.
Currently, Chat GPT is used to analyze the feelings expressed in the data, whether positive, negative or neutral, in addition, it can help provide a better understanding of people’s feelings about a particular topic, which can help in developing a tailored military propaganda strategy based on accurate information.
The start of information wars & Chatbots are at the heart of war propaganda
For years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in media wars, and its presence is common in the process of mass distribution of messages, especially with the use of bots or fake accounts on Twitter and other social platforms, however, the use of artificial intelligence in information warfare has never gone beyond the widespread repetition of rather simple messages. But does Chat GPT use a bot capable of writing content that simulates simple human writing styles?
The answer to that question is “No”, it is about a new revolution in the way information is obtained, analyzed, disseminated and manipulated.
The information war started years ago, specifically when Microsoft and Google announced the integration of chatbots that generate text in their BingGPT search engine, and in 2020, tech giants managed to build models that simulate ChatGPT, such as Google’s LamDA2.
At the end of 2021, Nvidia and Microsoft boasted of developing an English language model with the largest number of parameters, 530 billion, for natural language generation.
Around the same year, the Chinese company “Megatron-Turing” announced the creation of Baidu.
For years now, governments, organizations and companies have been integrating AI solutions into their media campaigns, particularly through the use of “chatbots” specially programmed to simulate a natural language conversation, which can help users solve a problem, order products or procure a service, as seen in on websites such as SNCF, Orange, Fnac, IKEA, and other companies such as Alexa from Amazon or Siri from Apple, which managed to use these bots to explain complex concepts in a way that is simple and understandable to their wide audience and provide answers fluently and reliably.
Over the past few years, these companies have developed their programs quickly and efficiently because they firmly believe that future information wars will be decisive, especially if they are used in military fields.
In military information warfare, ChatGPT can analyze data from sensors and other sources to identify and track targets on the battlefield, which is typically used to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of autonomous systems on the battlefield, as well as assess risks to make better decisions about how to operate safely and effectively.
The program may be used to obtain very accurate information, such as private documents and methods of their retrieval, or to extract and track specific information from text data, such as names, dates, or locations, as well as verify whether military information is accurate and complete.
At the logistical level, the program enables the management of military stocks, analyzing text data on invoices or shipping documents, and extracting information about the quantity, type, and location of stocks.
This allows for tracking stock levels and ensuring the availability of supplies when needed.
Furthermore, it helps analyze flight plan data and extract information about transportation routes and timetables to enable the creation of a clear strategy to confront the enemy during battles.
Given that a large part of the information and propaganda wars takes place at the level of social networking sites, Chat GPT will become a priority for military institutions in analyzing the large amount of information circulating on these platforms, and working to extract important information about public opinion, sentiment and common topics, especially those that analyze the positions of a certain group or message to determine its agenda.
However, the capabilities of Chat GPT do not stop at this level of information analysis in the service of military strategies, it can also be used effectively in deepfake campaigns, such as creating false texts and press releases, or even speeches that correspond to a specific agenda or message, such as formulating a press release that frames a specific military operation in a positive or negative light, before distributing it to the media, or creating deep fake videos, which can then be used to impersonate political figures or military leaders, or spread false information.
Furthermore, this software can analyze images, videos, natural language processing, and speech recognition to detect and identify objects, people, or other features of interest through security camera footage, and even translate speech to extract valuable information or detect suspicious activity.
It can also analyze text such as social media posts or chat messages, to detect patterns or keywords that indicate irregular activity.
Overall, Chat GPT can be used in many fields of military information, which would make information war the real and decisive war before the direct confrontation.
The software can develop itself to give us accurate information about the simplest and most complex topics, as it can predict the weather for months to come and give you accurate terrain analysis down to the military information that can help you develop accurate and effective strategies such as generating realistic scenarios and simulating real battles.
Ghost editor & Misinformation and propaganda wars
Many experts in the field of information warfare, propaganda and misinformation believe that Chat GPT is particularly suitable for conducting these types of campaigns by simulating people’s writing styles and skillfully generating huge amounts of different messages.
This technology can effectively spread false information without the need for human staff, relying only on machines to create diverse and believable content, as you can program millions of these bots to act like humans and have conversations designed to convince people of a certain point of view.
In fact, through this software, a bot can act as a “ghost editor” for propaganda media campaigns by publishing thousands of articles and counter-articles, a technique that global information companies are actively seeking to use as the bot-generated content and human-written content become identical.
On the other hand, this software can be an important and effective tool for detecting manipulations and thwarting misleading propaganda wars, especially in the military field by using the same mechanism in detecting manipulations and weaknesses, especially if hackers are used in this type of war.
Recently, some hackers admitted that the program effectively helps them discover vulnerabilities faster, a process that in the past needed longer, more than one program and multiple techniques, because traditional virtual assistants couldn’t accurately find a vulnerability in a system that they aren’t preprogrammed to find, as they fed on specific information and couldn’t develop their search methods and discover security vulnerabilities that humans hadn’t already discovered.
Therefore, it constitutes a very effective tool for technicians in detecting phishing emails, malicious links and other forms of social engineering attacks, especially emails that appear to come from a legitimate source, such as a bank or government agency, and trick recipients into providing sensitive information or clicking on a malicious link, as well as identifying and extracting information relevant to cyber security, such as phishing attempts and cyber attacks.
By: Dr Faisal Farhi (professor and university researcher)
