Are we really ready for Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Are we really ready for Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

There is a running joke about what AI is, but I am from Nebraska…if you are a farmer, you get the joke, but AI as it relates to Artificial Intelligence has been around for quite some time. Recently, it simply has become more prevalent; you might call it democratized.

I have mixed feelings about it. With the popularity of ChatGPT, the advent of CoPilot from Microsoft and the countless other competing vendors that have hopped on the “Chatbot bandwagon,” users have found that these tools can be extremely handy. I have used them myself. Honestly, I am not a professional writer so I use ChatGPT to take original content that I write, ask ChatGPT to improve it from a grammatical point of view, and then follow up with the Hemingway Editor to give me suggestions that will help me ensure my copy is readable by an average person. I think that is a valid use of the tools.  

As for my biggest fear, it is that these services may get massively misused and feed into what I think may become a new form of inter-human alienation. The alienation I am speaking of is that the overuse of AI to provide content may erode our trust in other human beings. We can no longer tell whether someone is communicating with us from a place in the heart, or whether a clever chatbot is the true author of a piece of content. A chatbot that combines social engineering techniques can be taught to deceive us on a whole new level.

To be fair, to my knowledge, a chatbot cannot produce anything on its own. It requires a real person to create a prompt; but a whole industry, of what are referred to as prompt engineers, have built basic instructions for personas that can be fed into AI. AI can then produce content as if they have a specific area of expertise. What could go wrong with that? Can someone without a moral compass pass themselves off as an expert in a field that they have no prior knowledge about?

The genie is out of the bottle so to speak…this piece of non-AI-produced or enhanced content is more of a question than anything else. Its purpose is to generate discussion on the topic. What do you think? Where do we draw the line for the ethical use of artificial intelligence vs human effort? We are going to have to answer these questions eventually, so we may as well start talking about it.  

For the record – this was written without the aid of Artificial Intelligence

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