Happy old year, happy new year...

Today I want to remind you of the main news in the technology area, not necessarily in chronological order, but the topics that were highlighted in the year 2023.

And we can’t start with another topic, ChatGPT made the news this year. In case you are not connecting the solution to the name, ChatGPT is artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI, capable of answering questions on a wide range of subjects, solving logical problems and providing appropriate solutions through messages, simulating a real conversation between human beings. To understand what this revolution was, I suggest reading the article I wrote at the beginning of the year on the subject, entitled ‘Will ChatGPT be the next big revolution in technology?‘.

To give you an idea of how strong the impact of this revolution was, most big techs they rushed to create a ChatGPT to call their own. Below, I briefly illustrate the actions that each company took.

Microsoft took the lead in this search and went directly to the source, investing around US$13 billion in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, sealing a partnership to use the solution in its products. The company’s search engine, Bing, has already incorporated artificial intelligence, which has caused an increase in use, worrying even the previously untouchable Google. This year, it expanded integrations with its residential and corporate solutions. However, not everything is flowers. In December, the body responsible for overseeing competition in the United Kingdom reported that it was investigating the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, due to recent changes in the board of directors of the pioneering artificial intelligence company. We will see how this investigation unfolds this year.

Google also felt the impact, and after years of dominance among search engines and online advertising, it became concerned about the advancement of ChatGPT, especially among more lay users in the IT area, due to the ease of interacting with artificial intelligence. With rival Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, Google realized it would have to respond in kind. Therefore, on February 6 last year, the company announced its counterattack, launching its ChatGPT called “Bard”. If you are interested in this story, I tell it in more detail in an article I wrote at that time, entitled ‘ChatGPT: Google strikes back‘.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which has had this name since 2021, when the company turned all its efforts to the Metaverse, believed that the year 2023 would consolidate technology in the world, however, it ended up having its plans frustrated. The Metaverse did not take off, and worse, most companies ended up abandoning or dismissing their teams dedicated to this project, such as Microsoft and Disney, which closed their divisions that handled research into this technology. After many failures, and in the midst of laying off 21,000 employees, Meta changed the company’s objectives, in the first half of last year. According to what was disclosed, the objectives are now artificial intelligence, messages, creators and monetization. One of the reasons for the failure of this technology, according to experts, was the success of artificial intelligence among the general public, due to the greater ease of interaction with technology. As a result, the metaverse increasingly took a backseat.

Apple seems to have its world apart. As it has a loyal audience, it stated that it intends to have its own “ChatGPT” only in mid to late 2024, together with the launch of iOS 18 (iOS is an operating system developed exclusively for Apple devices). The company asks its users for patience and caution, as above all, Apple cares about personal data and wants a solution that maintains customer privacy. And to reinforce this issue of the company appearing to be a world apart, it is one of the few that announced, last year, news for the metaverse, with the launch of virtual glasses. For you to better understand this story, I recommend reading the article ‘Apple could resurrect the Metaverse with the launch of virtual glasses‘.

We cannot forget that, although everyone remembers the name ChatGPT, it is nothing more than a model of artificial intelligence, which was the true highlight of the year, even generating cause for concern in the world due to its unbridled advancement. So much so that, on March 22, 2023, an “open letter” entitled ‘Pause Giant AI Experiments’ was published, with the following recommendation:

“We urge all AI labs to immediately stop, for at least six months, training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” with the following argument “AI systems with human competitive intelligence can pose profound risks for society and humanity.”

This letter drew attention because it had very well-known names, such as Elon Musk, billionaire, owner of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter; and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, among many others. Are you curious to know who else signed this letter and how the main countries in the world are dealing with this issue of regulating artificial intelligence? I leave here the recommendation of the article ‘Stop the robots: artificial intelligence needs a break‘.

In the year 2023, we witnessed one of the biggest strikes by screenwriters and actors, which stopped film productions in Hollywood for almost half a year. But, you might be wondering, isn’t this a technology news retrospective? This strike had technology as its main point, more specifically the latest advances in artificial intelligence, streaming and computer graphics. Briefly, I will focus on two main demands that directly involved the technology area.

In the first, both screenwriters and actors demand a review of residual earnings payments. In practice, this system works like this: the contract that the people involved in the film or series signed provided for the payment of an amount when the production was re-shown on TV or with the sale of DVD and Blu-ray. However, with the growth of streaming of videos, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, etc., this transfer has been falling, as the services understand that they should not pay for viewing, and as they own the platforms, it is difficult to audit how much should be paid.

The second claim concerns the use of artificial intelligence that affects actors and screenwriters differently. In the case of screenwriters, the concern about the use of artificial intelligence was clearly explained in an interview with CNN given by John August, a member of the WGA committee, a well-known screenwriter who has written famous films such as ‘Charlie’s Angels’, ‘ The Corpse Bride’, ‘Aladdin Live Action’, among others. John said, “Screenwriters are concerned that our scripts are the feedstock that is going into these systems to generate other scripts, treatments, and write story ideas. The work we do cannot be replaced by these systems.”

For actors, the issue of using artificial intelligence is more linked to the use of their image. According to Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the stadiums recently offered an innovative proposal. According to him, “in that innovative artificial intelligence proposal, they proposed that our supporting artists could be digitized, paid for a day of work, and the company would own this digitization. The image, then, could be used for the rest of eternity in any project they want, without consent and without compensation”, and he added, “so, if you think this is an innovative proposal, I suggest you think again”. And if you think that using digital actors is so distant in the future, you may not remember, but we have been using this technology for some time now. In 2016, the film ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’ used CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) technology to bring back actor Peter Cushing, who had passed away in 1994 and played the character Moff Tarkin in the 1977 film, ‘ Star War – Episode IV: A New Hope’, for the new film, with the same role.

Last year, we had one of the most unusual fights in technology, between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Now, you might be thinking that these billionaires, considered geniuses in the area of technology and innovation, are having some intellectual dispute. And to some extent true, as there is a dispute between Musk’s Twitter and Mark’s new Threads network. This evolved into not just an intellectual fight, but also a physical one. I suggest reading an article in which I go deeper into this topic, entitled ‘Duelo de tits: Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg‘. However, moving forward a little with the end of this story, despite the bravado of the two billionaires on social media, it seems that the fight will remain virtual, and there will no longer be an actual physical fight. However, when it comes to Elon Musk, let’s keep an eye on it.

And finally, unfortunately, I cannot help but comment on the increase in the number of scams using more and more new technologies. With the evolution of artificial intelligence, more elaborate scams can be carried out, using the concept of “deep fake“. This word possibly originates from the concept of “deep learning“, which is machine learning based on artificial neural networks, to function like the human brain. a technique or intelligence that learns as more data is offered to it. In this way, with the “deep fake“, you use the learning technique, for example, to imitate the person’s face, voice and even insert the face into another body, in an organic way, where you don’t notice the difference and think it’s real.

In the past, there were scams where a person would call pretending to be another, and most of the time, you would notice that it was a scam. Now, imagine the same scam with your mother’s voice and way of speaking, or even a video call where your mother appears asking for money. How do you know if it’s true? We still have another form that has grown this year, which is “deep nudes“. At the end of November, Portuguese surfer Mariana Rocha Assis, 26, said on her social networks that she was being extorted by people who generated nude images of her using artificial intelligence. Unfortunately it is not an isolated case. During the year, we had some cases of this type of crime, such as that of actress Sis Valverde, who called her lawyers after discovering nude photos of her also created with the help of AI. Even though the body used is not the person’s, put yourself in the victim’s place, and even though the photos are not exactly of the person’s body, the people who will receive it don’t know. Imagine these photos leaked in family groups or at your work. Wouldn’t you feel as if they were real?

These types of techniques will be a huge challenge for this year’s elections. Imagine receiving an audio or video of candidate A or B in order to obtain votes. This will be a great acid test for the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) on how to combat this type of misinformation. The next elections could be the one in which we have the most fake news difficult to identify. It is up to the voter to always check the source of news and videos.

I believe I have already spent a lot of time on this retrospective. We still had many other events in the area of technology that were left out, I tried to focus on the cases that most impacted the year 2023, after all, more and more the area of technology has invaded all areas of humanity, being a path of no return. I like to end articles with a sentence, and thinking about this issue of artificial intelligence and the concern we have with it, I found a sentence by Sidney Harris, American journalist and cartoonist, which can help us reflect on the topic: