Brand related content was created and consumed. But of late, there is virtual flood of content on the internet. In past, one promotional brochure was used over a period of time. This could be done more frequently, say a monthly brochure. Things have changed after ChatGPT arrived. Brands will resort to using it. It will make it easier for business to create brand-related content. It may affect the need for human content creators and copywriters. Brands can gain a lot if they start using ChatGPT. It is a stepping stone to create content that is relevant, engaging and personal. The visualisation could be provided by DALL-E.

A gig is a slang for a job that lasts for a specified period of time. A gig worker is hired to do a gig. He could be a freelancer or an independent contractor. He is hired on the basis of the completion of that task or project. He could be a contract-based hire.

In the IT industry, of late, there is high attrition — the employees leave the employer. There is a demand for full-stack developers, data scientists and cloud engineers. Thus in IT industry, many startups, and small and medium sized firms hire gig workers. Full-time employees affect profitability, and hence there is a shift to gig hiring. There is a need to do gig hiring in high-skill jobs. It helps the organisations to manage their costs and human resources.

India has a manpower pool of STEM graduates. Besides, it produces 1.5 million engineers every year. The global scale shortage of manpower could be met through this pool. Gig tech talent will have a crucial role in meeting the growing demand of manpower globally.

Gig workers have a bright future as opportunities for contractual work improve across IT, telecom, healthcare sectors. 5G penetration and digitisation too boost the gig economy.

ChatGPT was touted to replace humans, especially creative writers. However, it could work to assist people, and not replace them in the long run.

It is a question-answering AI portal which responds to queries in a conversational mode. Its CEO says that it is still a work in progress, though it gives an impression of greatness. It is not correct to rely on it for anything important, as a lot of work is needed to make it more robust and truthful.

It is a fun to use it for creative inspiration. However, it is not a good idea to use it for factual queries. It is a language model and it does not have access to current events or news. Its knowledge is based on a snapshot of internet as it existed in 2021. It does not have the ability to browse the internet or access the updated information.

LaMDA and BERT from Google were withheld deliberately as they could have some biases, and could sometimes confidently say wrong things, and imagine things instead of sticking to facts.

Indian parliament set up a house panel which called Big Tech’s ad business ‘a monopolist threat.’ It advised the government to take corrective steps for anti-competitive behaviour of the Big Tech. It suggested enactment of competitive legislation.

Even the standing committee on finance pointed out the anti-competitive practices of Big Tech. It suggested to examine competitive behaviour ex ante before monopolies set in. At present the attention is post happening. It suggested a framework for ‘systemically important digital intermediaries. (SIDIS).’

It suggested enhanced competition law and the strengthening the of CCI, with a specialised digital markets unit.

This is the internet age. Internet made it possible to have social media and communication technologies. At the same time, along with technologies, there were issues to regulate these technologies. These technologies must serve the society. While regulating these, we have to take care that the baby is not thrown out with the bath water. Governments can set rules, but they should not suffocate the openness and freedom of expression that people value.

Mainly, in the world, the three regulatory pillars are the US, the EU and India. The European Union took the lead by launching GDPR. India launched the Digital India Act, the Telecom Act and the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDP), 2022.

In the world, China operates internet that is closed to the rest of the world. In non-Chinese model, we have regulation from the US, the EU and India. The aim is to keep the openness of internet for future generations.

The tech companies must be forward-looking. Facebook has invested a lot in metaverse.

The data flows across the Atlantic, from the EU to the US. Data cannot be locked up. It is as good as air. It spreads. The whole issue of localisation of data is to be seen in context. Data is called oil, as it is valuable. However, there is a difference. Once you use the oil, you burn it, and it is gone. Data sovereignty debate too is going on in parts of Europe. The data flows affect the investment scene too between the US and Europe.

Facebook provided ‘like’ button in 2009. Since then, 13 years have elapsed. Still there are voices to have Facebook regulated. A digital eco-system must move data effortlessly from one service to the other — it is called data portability. Of course, it threatens privacy. It is a trade-off between competition and privacy.

In augmented reality platform such as metaverse, rule makers, decide the rules about data portability, data use, eye-tracking, integrity, safety, child security, and age-gating. Privacy experts should ensure that users have control to switch these features on and off. It is not necessary to monitor involuntary and autonomous eye movements. It is not necessary to ferret out data about intuitive reflexes.

Some issues are much hyped, e.g. hate speech accounts form 0.02 per cent of content. It could be never be zero, but we could improve upon the current situation. Through advances in AI, its percentage has been cut by over 50 per cent.

The Governments insist on tracing the origin of mischievous messages on WhatsApp. However, the media says it breaks the encryption. This tracebility issue is sub judice. The trace back is not consistent with the security and privacy of communication.

The new Data Protection Bill mandates user consent for using data for purposes other than for which it was collected. Users must consent to the way their data is used. However, if we keep asking consent every now and then, it is meaningless. The best way is to seek consent that is comprehensible to users.

Social media must be open and consistent. They employ independent fact checkers in different countries.

Social media use algorithms to assess the profile of their users. Most of these algorithms suppress misinformation, hate speech and border line content. Facebook took the lead and offered database to 11 universities to assess the behaviour of people at the time of 2020 presidential election. There could be greater audit of data and higher content moderation.

Children are protected and parents have been provided controls to regulate their behaviour.

Very soon, a bank’s website will have an avatar of a branch manager greeting a customer. This is facilitated by Easiofy Solutions which provides web-based AR-solutions. The avatars will speak in vernacular language too. A proof of concept is being done with IOC. Easiofy has developed a virtual bank walkthrough. The customers are guided with reception meta avatar to appropriate counters. As all customers may not have VR headsets, Easiofy has created a browser-based banking metaverse. The multi-lingual ability is given through a voice-suite consisting of Speech-to-Text (STT), Natural Language Processing(NLP) and Text-to-Speech (TTS). It is now working on monetising its metaverse bank.

In a modern business organisation, especially after digital transformation, there are several C-suite roles — chief financial officer (CFO), chief operating officer (COO), chief technical officer (CTO) etc. These top level executives report to CEO or Chief Executive Officer. If the CEO is also the Board member, he may be called Managing Director or MD. A big organisation can have different MDs for different verticals, each assisted by assistants. The position being senior ranks higher than mid-management jobs such as VPs or vice-presidents.

Of these C-level jobs, we will focus on the role of a chief technical officer (CTO). A CEO manages the whole company, whereas a CTO oversees the technical team. He/she manages the physical assets as well as the technology team. In fact, he has to deploy the technology team for particular tasks. He/she is also responsible for network and system management. He/she does integration testing and develops the technical operations personnel. He/she interacts with clients.

A typical CTO draws in India a salary ranging between Rs.7.5 lac to Rs.102 lac. His/her average annual salary is Rs.34 lac.

How qualified is a CTO? It all depends. He may have formal technical qualifications, but more than that what matters the way he/she experiments, hacks and codes. The engineering skills possessed count more.

He/she must have business sense, leadership and communication skills. As a manager, he must be a good decision maker. He/she should have the ability to conduct research, do strategic thinking, time management. and the ability to recruit technical talent.

A CTO’s career, though stressful, is highly satisfying. Of course, it is filled with uncertainty.

Lensa is free photography app. It is owned by Prisma Labs. In a short time after its launch, Lensa AI has become the most downloaded app in the USA and sixth most downloaded app in India. It turns selfies into unique, colourful avatars. It photo edits very competently.

Lensa is an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that builds new images from a large corpus of other images, The images that ask the app to photo edit will be a part of the corpus and will affect the types of images generated for others. In other words, AI will be trained on our images in some very small way.

Experts caution users to be careful while using the app. There are issues of face identification and iris scans.

There is metadata inside the images, and now it gets used in the model to generate these images is a matter of concern.

Users could unwillingly agree to share personal information. To prevent misuse, there should be a strong password, biometric authorization or two-factor authorization.

The company contends it is within its rights to ‘reproduce, modify, distribute and create derivative works’ of user content. The user content is the original photos submitted by the user for edit and the AI-generated content created with the use of the app.

The rapidly rising interest rates played a role in bursting the bubble of cryptos. There were flaws — these were fragile, badly governed and at times fraudulent. There were failures of Terra-Luna, Three Arrows Capital or Voyager Digital. Then came the collapse of FTX.

Investor demand surpassed what cryptos could achieve reasonably in near-term. As the cryptos could not become full-fledged currencies, they were mainly used for speculation and dubious activity. Crypto mania was fuelled by low interest rates, with firms taking excessive leverage. Investors chased bigger returns to supersede the market and beat the competition. All this summed up to more leverage and more risk taking.

This does not mean that the technology backed cryptos are at fault. There are other modes of digital finance and blockchain technology. To illustrate, smart contracts has the potential to improve payment systems and entrance financial inclusion. Central banks too are launching their own CBDCs to strengthen financial stability and assert their monetary sovereignty.

Regulators have a dilemma whether to regulate cryptos or not. There cannot be protection of private loss at the cost of public. And if the markets are left unregulated, there could be instability in the market.

Organisations operating on the lines of banks do require regulation. Some organisations act like casinos, and must be monitored for fraud. Investors must be cautioned that their speculative losses cannot be protected.

One has to be beware of crypto billionaires boasting of audits. In the 1980s savings and loan crisis, a US judge asked, ‘Where were the lawyers and accountants?’ The same question is relevant today as there is crackdown on cryptocurrency industry worth $3 trillion at the peak. Of course, it is patchily regulated.

Auditors and lawyers are considered as important gatekeepers by regulators. However, audits do not review internal controls. Legal advice is more nuanced and less formalistic than accounting. The transparency at crypto firms must be much more. The accountants and attorneys must fulfill their responsibilities.

An Indian company called CyberRoot Risk Advisory runs a surveillance-for-hire network. It maintains several accounts on social media to lure users globally for phishing and surveillance on behalf of its clients. The accounts maintained are fake and the persons holding such accounts declare diverse professions such as business executives, media persons and journalists.

In phishing, domains of major email providers are spoofed. There are video conferencing and file staring tools. Corporate email servers are targeted. The login credentials of the victims are stolen.

There is commercialisation of the surveillance industry in the last five years. Such industries do legitimate business too by selling tools to law enforcement and other responsible agencies.

These agencies forget users who are executives, doctors, lawyers, activists, journalists clergy.

BellTrox is another firm that is in the surveillance business.

Facebook recently took down the accounts related with CyberRoot.