Don’t let AI take over your mind
Every once in a while, you come across something in your professional life that makes you question people and wonder how they could have possibly made the decision they did. This week was one of those weeks.
As I often do, I was scrolling through LinkedIn, keeping up with my network and observing what people I know were up to. I enjoy LinkedIn and find it to be one of the most beneficial and underutilized tools in business. Some people I know use it brilliantly, while others refuse to recognize its profound benefits.
I came across a post from someone I’ve known for a long time. In order to protect the innocent, I won’t publicly name the individual, but he’s an accomplished person who holds a very prestigious job with a well known company. He’s someone whose post you would stop and read and that’s exactly what I did.
His post was a dissertation about the importance of a specific role in a business and how that role impacts the inner workings of an organization. He was in fact correct about the value of the role, but there was something I realized right away. The role he was writing about was actually his job. In other words, he was publicly obliviating about himself and the importance of a job that he held. It was the most blatant form of self promotion I have ever witnessed and once I realized it, I stopped in my tracks.
It gets better. At the end of his post, he had a disclaimer that his post was “partially written” by artificial intelligence (AI). Not only did someone post something on LinkedIn promoting the importance of a job they held, they wrote it with the help of AI. While I give him credit for the AI disclaimer and admitting he didn’t author the post himself, it’s still a disgrace and a disappointing example of how AI is being used.
AI has changed the world. Even though it’s still in its infancy and its full potential has not been recognized, AI has transformed organizations and changed the way people work. Gone are the days where you have to spend inordinate amounts of time researching a topic that you aren’t familiar with. Instead, you can type a few prompts into ChatGPT and get a dissertation on any subject you could imagine.
AI can make you more efficient, regardless of your job. AI can streamline and simplify complex tasks that turn days of work into minutes and it does this at a fraction of the cost of a human being. It doesn’t matter what type of work you do, if you’re not using AI, you’re missing out.
People are scared of AI. They worry about it taking away jobs. People say AI could be the demise of humanity and get so out of control, it abolishes the human race. While that sounds a bit extreme, it’s important to recognize that nobody is a true expert in the technology. If AI is doing what it has already done in such a short amount of time, imagine what its impact will be twenty or thirty years from now. AI only gets smarter and more effective and its impact on the world is limitless and unknown.
There is however, one major problem I have with AI. If people use it nefariously, it can make people appear to be something they are not. If you use AI to express your thoughts or opinions, you are a cheater.
AI does not belong in any form of writing. I could type “Write an opinion column about why AI is bad” into Chat GPT, copy, paste and publish it and people would think I’m a phenom. The truth is, people who use AI to express their thoughts or opinions are doing a disservice to themselves and those who consume their content.
When it comes to real world thoughts and ideas, AI has no place. Be cautious about what you read, where you read it and who allegedly wrote it. You never know if you’re reading someone’s honest thoughts and beliefs or an opinion generated by technology that requires no intellectual thought or effort to produce.
