Keynote Audience Q&A – “What’s Up with AI?” : A Reality Check

From a recent keynote – an audience member wants to know what’s up!

I thought it might be helpful to share the whole transcript.

I like to know, what do you feel about AI? And what’s beyond AI, in your opinion?

A bloody mess.

I’ve been talking about the AI for a long time, obviously,as a futuirst.

A couple of observations.

Number one, it is going to be the speaking topic of 2023. I’ve got about 40 bureaus and agents around the world who book me and represent me, and the number of inquiries coming in on that topic is staggering, and we’re all seeing that because of what has happened with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT  is this thing, you type in something and it comes back with some information, and I think the first time we saw that, it was like the first time we saw the World Wide Web and we went, ‘whoah, look at that, there’s something magical happening here.

I had a situation with ChatGPT, I’m a geek, I run my own servers and I needed some server code run, and I went in and asked, after asking a whole bunch of people online, how do I write this code? Nobody could give me a response, and I went into ChatGPT and asked, how do I write this code? It gave me a perfect answer.

But the problem that is unfolding here, and I put a post out about this on my website three days ago, is, as a society, it’s become painfully obvious, we don’t know how to deal with misinformation…

Look at what has happened in the US with the election, you look at what has happened with MAGA =supporters and all of that.

And what AI is allowing us to do is number one, it does generate errrors, it’s not perfect information, people are going to trust it, and it’s going to allow us to generate misinformation at scale in ways that are simply profound.

If you’re on Instagram, there’s somebody who’s generating… I think, I can’t remember her name, but she’s an artificially intelligent generated image of a young girl named Alice or something like that, and every day he puts out to social networks, “which picture should I use today?” and people vote which one’s gonna go on Instagram. And if you look at her, you would never know it was generated by an AI.

We are mere months away from the ability to generate full-on video content that you wouldn’t know that it’s not real.

There’s a guy who just two days ago put up a picture, a video of how he cloned himself using technology, he made an almost perfect image of him saying something, using an image generator, an AI to generate the text…an AI voice generator to do his voice.

I’m an optimist about technology, I’m an optimist about the future, I can’t come out here on stage and say, “Guess what? Your future sucks!” I wouldn’t get a lot of repeat business.

And I’m terrified by what’s going on by AI. For the first technology, it’s got me absolutely freaked out, , and I think we’re gonna do a lot of really stupid things with it as well.

There’s a lot going on right now to take our support desks, which we manage to a call center and put an AI engine on it, and that’s going come out as with staggering speed, and if we thought we were dealing with customer support hell right now, it’s gonna get unbelievably bad, because the implementations will go wrong and the technology will go bad.

So I’m actually quite a pessimist on it. I think there’s a lot of opportunities, if we look at the world of medicine, the ability for an AI to go through 100 x-rays and interpret those x-rays far more intelligently than a human can to identify conditions, it’s magical.

But on the other side, it’s scary.

I think it’s inevitable, your customer workgroups and other groups will get involved with AI and looking at it. I mean, this is the topic at 2023, and I think you have to go at it with caution.

Tthe other side of it is, last year the whole focus was on Meta and artificial reality and cryptocurrency and blockchain, and that all sort of collapsed and went nowhere and now, the entire Silicon Valley is going “whoah, a shiny new toy, AI… the amount of venture capital, of money going in, it is simply unreal, so we’re in for an interesting ride.

AI. The future. What’s your plan?