If you have listened to the news, podcasts, or youtube over the passed few weeks, you have probably heard ChatGPT mentioned. There are numerous videos online showing how to use it to do your homework, write code, make money, and even a few surprising hacks and jailbreaks. It has reignited the fear and debate over whether AI will cause a loss of jobs, specifically for coders and customer service operators more recently.

This is my experience so far, and some ideas on whether people need to be worried.

Chatting with chatGPT is like chatting with many chatbots, except responses are lengthy and more accurate, and you can ask that responses be altered in specific ways. This is the “Transformative” portion if chatgpt, allowing the bot to continue referencing the original question. Basic it remembers what started the conversation and isn’t limited to a single answer.

Here, i ask it to tell me a joke about AI, then I asked for a different answer in a cheeky way:

Now I go on to ask it to tell a joke about AI, but in the style if Edgar Allen Poe. (recently binge watched Wednesday):

For us, the most useful everyday use of ChatGPT would be it’s ability to write code. Later I asked it how to create my own chatGPT using python script. It gave me all the code, as well as an explanation of how to run it and committed what each part of the code did. Ut referenced api keys, which i asked “how do i acquire an api key that this code needs?” And it gave me the url and detailed steps to acquire an api key from openai

Within a few minutes, I had my own chatgpt app

I want to play with this more hopefully find some jail breaks and hacks. So I’m going to label this post as part 1 with as many as 2 more to come.

For now, I want to talk about possibilities. Yes, this is a great coding tool. Google is a great coding tool, but you can spend a long time searching for code and scripts that accomplishes your task, runs in your environment, and is the correct version. GitHub is amazing, but it can be overwhelming to someone with little or no programming knowledge. ChatGPT can literally make you custom code and scripts based on what you ask for. If they don’t work, you simply tell the chat, ad well ad the error, and it will rewrite it.

This is perfect for automation and SOAR for those of us in defensive security. Let’s say you are a jr analyst and you know bash any python, but not powershell, which is primarily what your SIEM uses for automated responses on Windows host. Maybe you need to make automation that quarantine a host to prevent lateral movement from an attacker, and Powershell is the only script all of the host in your environment will run. ChatGPT: write a powershell script that will quarantine a compromised host on a network. Copy, then go straight to testing.

Will people loose jobs from this? With this specific version, I doubt it. What comes from this could cause some job loss in the developer field, but it’s more likely developers will use it as a tool to help with parts of their code. Besides, there are still errors in some of the code ChatGPT produces, and many organizations would not want every detail of their network and trade secrets handed over to OpenAI to let software owned by openAI write their infrastructure as code, scripts, and full apps. Basically I’m saying coders won’t loose their jobs, but the knowledge required to be a coder might include people who know virtually no languages.

As I stated above, I would like to follow up on this post. I think in the next few weeks we will see uses for this AI that we can’t imagine at the moment.