How Will ChatGPT Impact Web2, Web3 and Online Security? – Spiceworks News and Insights

Yes, it’s another article about ChatGPT, and rightly so. Since the release of the latest generative AI platform from a company known as OpenAI back in November 2022, it seems everyone, from application developers to journalists and public school superintendents, has something to say about it. Much of the conversation deals with macro-level questions of disruption. How many millions of jobs will it displace? Will it forever change learning as we know it? Will mankind ever produce another creative thought ever again? Has it seen the Terminator movies and learned about Skynet?

When it comes to ChatGPT, there’s been a lot of grandiose predictions coupled with a lot of fear-mongering. ChatGPT, in the end, is a tool. What makes it different is that unlike a shovel or a computer, it is a tool that can learn as it goes to improve itself on its own. That’s why it’s difficult to accurately predict how it matures. In the short term, its most likely impact will be visible within our web experiences and how we secure them. Let’s start with the traditional web experience, otherwise known as Web2. 

ChatGPT and Web2

Anything I have to say in this article is, of course, speculative at best. So, who better to ask how ChatGPT will change Web2 than ChatGPt itself? In its own modest words:

“ChatGPT won’t make a major difference to Web2, as it is designed to work with existing chatbot technologies. However, ChatGPT could be used to augment existing chatbot systems to provide more natural language understanding and a more human-like conversation. ChatGPT will not make web2 irrelevant.”

I decided to press the ChatGPT by inquiring about the future of Web2. According to it, Web2 is transitioning into a more interactive, user-friendly, immersive experience. It will deliver more features and allow users to connect and share content easier and more efficiently than ever before, all of which will provide users with a more enhanced experience.

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Web2 in its Current Visual Form

It might be just a transition to natural-language interaction, but that transition will change everything. That’s because Web2 is visual in nature. We go to an online search engine, type in a few keywords, hit the enter key and hope we get the results we want in one try. We then begin the vertical scroll, scanning the near-endless results. If it’s a hot topic that can be monetized, the first several links are ads that may or may not be beneficial. After clicking several links, we may find ourselves clicking on the subsequent pages or, even worse, modifying the keywords and starting over.

There’s a lot going on within the backend, too, as bloggers, online retailers and companies strive to grab their share of the online audience, hoping we will click their links. To improve their odds, many of them dedicate a considerable amount of time to learning how to manipulate the Google search algorithm. SEO professionals research the exact words that are pulling in audiences. Those keywords are forwarded to bloggers and writers who carefully intertwine them into their content in a way that hopefully seems natural, all to garner a prescribed page view objective. 

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The Web2 Experience Will Change

What happens to all of this when ChatGPT takes over the search process? Will keywords matter to it? What will happen to the value of page views and unique sessions if users never leave the chat interface, and how will advertisers be charged? What about the comments of other users? Will we even care what other people have to say on a given topic, or will the wise words of AI Chat be the only opinion that matters in the future? 

I myself still refuse to talk to a virtual assistant such as Alexa, but it seems to me that people who do readily accept what Alexa has to say more than a common search engine. The fact is that Web2 will change just as communication changed once we transitioned from flip phones to smartphones. One thing that separates it from regular search engines is its ability to comprehend the context of a user’s query in addition to other nuances, making it a more customized and personal experience. Currently, ChatGPT has no knowledge of events occurring after December 31, 2021, and it isn’t permitted to access the internet, so its search capabilities are slightly limited for now.

Accelerating the Transition to Web3

We have witnessed a growing presence of Web3 over the past several years in the form of virtual chat assistants and blockchain technologies. ChatGPT is the kerosene that will feed the Web3 flame as users begin to realize that virtual assistants can be used for more productive things than turning off the lights or asking about the weather. The result will be a more interactive experience for users. It will also provide businesses the ability to attain an entirely new level of personalized customer service that was unimaginable a decade ago. 

Cybersecurity and ChatGPT

ChatGPT was a little brassier when asked how it would help improve cybersecurity. It told me that its greatest strength is its ability to detect and predict malicious cyber activities in real-time. It uses natural language processing capabilities to detect malignant text-based communications, such as phishing attacks, and alert security teams accordingly. 

Cybersecurity vendors have been telling us for a couple of years now how AI integration will revolutionize cybersecurity and make computing far safer. Declarative statements of that kind of magnitude have a history of not delivering. When Hiram Maxim invented the machine gun in 1884, the prevailing thought was that it would prevent wars from happening. After all, what army would possibly attack a defensive position with that type of weapon at its disposal? In the end, it only resulted in heavier casualties. Something tells me that AI isn’t going to eradicate the threat landscape.

The sword and the machine benefit both — the good and the bad. While OpenAI attests that ChatGPT is programmed not to create malicious code or provide information that can be used for malicious intent, cybersecurity professionals at CheckPoint Research have found ways to get around this. It seems that using natural language, it is possible to get ChatGPT to do things such as write a phishing emailOpens a new window for research or hypothetical purposes. They have also found instancesOpens a new window of cybercriminals with average threat actor skill sets using OpenAI to create malicious code. AI, it seems, can serve two opposing masters at the same time.