Are you worried about AI?

As technology continues to advance, more and more people are becoming worried about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI).

While there's no denying that AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries, it's only natural for people to have concerns about how it will be used and what it will mean for their daily lives.

I was having a chat with Panos from Zenus this week and he mentions the "fear curve" that happened with online banking.

When online banking first became popular, many people were understandably wary of using it. After all, it's one thing to hand over your money to a teller at a brick-and-mortar bank, but entrusting your hard-earned cash to a computer seemed like a risky proposition.

But as time has gone on, online banking has become increasingly prevalent, and many people have come to prefer it over traditional methods. In fact, according to a recent study, nearly two-thirds of people in the United States now use online banking as their primary method of managing their finances and over 60% use it more than once a week.

So why did people's attitudes toward online banking change?

It's simple: as people became more familiar with the technology and learned how to use it safely and securely, their fears began to dissipate. They realized that online banking was not only convenient but also just as safe (if not safer) than traditional methods.

The same is likely to happen with AI.

Following the Curve

As I was doing a little research to help support this blog, a notification popped up on LinkedIn from Parry Malm. He'd just posted a blog about "ChatGPT can be a prejudiced asshole" More on that in a second, but he referenced what I was about to write about...

Gartner's "hype cycle".

Borrowing from Parry's text; "Gartner, the industry analysts, have what they call the “hype cycle”. When new technology comes out, it quickly generates lots of buzz, and you experience the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”. But then, once people realize its limitations, you soon enter the “Trough of Disillusionment”. 

And this is where platforms like ChatGPT are at at the minute - the peak of inflated expectations.

As Gartner puts it, "Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not."

But Parry read my mind (and did more input and research on this - read his article here), that platforms like ChatGPT cannot be trusted.

I've been using AI technology to support content creation for over a year now. When I started out, it came with heavy warnings about not trusting outputs, do your own fact checking and research, effectively saying that you still need quality human input to generate accurate output. In fact, when I asked for some help in finishing this paragraph, it popped up a message that it couldn't...it was claiming this was sensitive content. Does AI not like us bad mouthing AI? hmmm.

But Parry's point dove a little deeper - he was looking at the fact that bias does existing in these platforms and you need to be careful "and that should worry all of us." (again, I suggest you read his article for more details about this.

AI needs human input

Whilst people may be fearful of AI today, and understandably so, it's only a matter of time before we realize the many benefits that this technology can offer. Whether it's helping to improve healthcare outcomes or making transportation more efficient or in our world of events, better networking or content creation, there's no doubt that AI has the potential to transform our world for the better, we just need to be careful and not solely reliant on the machines taking over just yet.

Like any technology, AI has the potential to be misused, and using some of that lockdown language, "we need to be vigilant" to ensure that it is used responsibly. As we continue to learn more about AI and how to use it effectively, it's likely that it will become an increasingly valuable tool in our daily personal and work lives.

So while it's natural to feel a bit of trepidation about the potential impact of AI, over time we will embrace it and come to see it as one of the greatest technological advances in recent history.

What are your thoughts on AI?

Do you share some of the same concerns, or do you think that it will ultimately be a positive force? Let me know in the comments below!