Relying on Generative AI Has Its Pitfalls

One of the world’s most well-known generative AI systems, ChatGPT can create human-sounding natural language text in response to a user’s query, text that can range in complexity from a simple conversational exchange to a detailed analysis of a scholarly topic. ChatGPT provides a series of buttons by which users can rate their opinion of the response, including one that invites users who are dissatisfied with the text to try again by selecting the option to ‘Regenerate Response’. The reviewer shares his suspicions with the journal editor, who in turn contacts the author for an explanation. One of the most exciting aspects of generative AI is its capacity to automate content needs in the engineering workplace. The same potential is also the source of its greatest threat to professional ethics when it presents engineers with the temptation to offload business activities or preliminary work along with tasks that fall within the engineer’s professional responsibilities or that require the exercising of engineering judgment.