AI Adoption...Do IT!

Yooooooooo...How are my Security Early adopters doing today? Hopefully the sales meetings run short, and the donuts flow freely! As I was sitting in on my last set of sales pitches, my mind drifted to my fave topic...AI.  I was day dreaming as to which jobs would truly be replaced by AI...and then realized that sales is relatively safe because AI can't deliver donuts yet...I chuckled a bit thinking of a robot dog trying to carry pastries and well the silliness lead to some serious introspection.  Yes...I did find inspiration day dreaming about a robot dog delivering donuts...and we will need to take a travel back in time to fully delve into this crazy thought...

Lets go back in time 5.5k years to 3,527 BCE, when Og of the Owah tribe of homo-sapiens imagined a directional rock that would later be refined to be the first wheel...they realized that disc shaped rocks could roll down a hill in a direction that was more controllable than round rocks...now, most everything at that time was carried by hand or by pack animal, but that was limited in scale as to how much they could carry.  Og being considered one of the first true engineers the world had seen had already made considerable contributions to boating and cloth making, but this was truly revolutionary...Og imagined his new invention could be used to extend the pack animals usefulness by adding a basket with wheels attached and carry it behind the pack animal...he suddenly had a way to allow the pack animal to carry double, triple, even quadruple the load that the pack animal itself could carry.  Og's middle manager boss quickly took credit for the wheel and the increase in productivity and got promoted to Director of Pack Animal Optimization, but that's a tale for another time.

When the wheel first made its intro, is was not happily adopted by all.  The Manual Labor Guild (ML Guild) quickly tried to join forces with the Animal Guild International (AGI) to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about the new invention.  Og was demonized as praying to the wrong Sun God and how only a heretic could come up with a job destroying invention like the wheel. It might have been luck that Og's middle manager boss ran with the technology as Og died penniless and ostracized with such powerful smear campaigns levied against him.  But I digress...

Within a few years of Og's subsequent banishment, there was a slow revolution taking place as more and more laborers broke with their guild and in order to handle more delivery orders, adopted the wheel to be able to carry more goods to market. Detailing one of histories first true successful adoptions of new technology.  Those stalwarts of the ML Guild and the AGI group who did not adopt the wheel were soon replaced by those who did.  The job of logistics and carrying products as not replaced by the wheel, but it made it more efficient.  Less Animals were needed to carry things, and less humans were needed to hand carry things, which allowed society to use horses for other things...like racing and more humans having more leisure time lead to the worlds first gambling on horse races! What a time to be alive!

Fast forward in time about 5.5k years to the early 1990's...more and more people were using something called the "internet" as it was being transitioned from a defense and educational network to a commercial one. Before Google there were amazing tools called Archie (which could search...<drum rolls>...Archives...get it? Lol!), and World Wide Web Wanderer.  This is where I had my first "Fear the Og moment".  At that time, I was a young man who prided himself on knowing and retaining vast amounts of IT knowledge and was one of the unshaven computer guru's had to put up with if they wanted to run their computers safely and efficiently. 

When I first saw these search engines pop up I immediately thought my short career was over.  Surely people would be able to replace me and those like me since they could search for the answers themselves. I was worried for about 2-3 months if I remember correctly...and that fear was squelched upon discovering my first bit of misinformation funny enough.  It was false solution to an issue...those that didn't already know the solution would end up wasting time and then they had to bring the computer to me to not only fix the original issue, but to fix the "fix" they had attempted themselves...it took me double the time to fix and I suddenly was not fearful of the new tool.  In fact the more I adopted the tool and relied less and less on my printed books and magazines, the more work I would get accomplished which lead to more profitability to my burgeoning company!

Now lets travel to the present...We are already seeing the FUD being created around todays Og moment...AI.  Doom and Gloom stories about how whole swaths of industries will be replaced and how people will starve in the streets. The reality is work will change...but work will always be there. There will be need for people who can leverage AI as a new tool in their tool box...just like the wheel and search engines augmented and made work easier...work didn't go away, we just increased the pace of work.

Sometime in the middle of 2023 a quote emerged that was roughly, Artificial intelligence (AI) won’t replace employees. But people who use AI will replace people who don’t...This paradigm was not some epiphany moment that a guru had...it was merely stating precedence.  A precedence of every technological milestone humans have ever crossed proves this adage to be true.  So the question now comes...how do we use this new technology? How do we use it safely?

Simple, we learn it.  Start using the tools.  Start playing around with Dall-E, Midjourney...use bings search ChatGPT.  Learn how to get real data from it, as I can assure you that it does make mistakes.  Learn to formulate your requests in a way to get the correct answer as I can assure you that there are ways to get the wrong answer!

There is no other way to gain this experience than to actually use it. This being said, just like any other learning experience, please do not use production or sensitive data when you are playing around.  Don't mention any sensitive data at all. These tools, especially AGI tools, are still learning! A question regarding some of your companies sensitive intellectual property can train these AI tools that your sensitive data exists and how to interact with it.  While I finish off the post going over numerous tips on how to effectively use AI safely, it would be beneficial for everyone to start using the tools.  Grow past your Og moment!

So please adopt these tools! Some of the ones I have been playing with are:

• Dall-E (fun goofing around)
• MidJourney (more realistic looking fun goofing around)
• Bing's ChatGPT (swiss army knife of tools can do a ton of neat stuff even though it sometimes gives me bogus information)
• Blaze.ai (Marketing focused copy writer)
• Slidesai.io (Create Google Slides, for Powerpoint I have been using some proprietary tools since I want to protect my intellectual property)
• Hostinger (decent AI web builder)
• LLAMA (another large language model...like ChatGPT)
• H2o.ai (another another ChatGPt like tool)

As always, please be careful with how you use these tools.  They can and will learn from you. Also do yourself a favor and check the AI's work.  I have caught AI either flat out lying to me or being confused itself and giving me wrong info.  Check AI's work and you should be ok.

Next up in this series of AI blogs are tips on how to use AI effectively and safely...till next time!

As always, Contact Us to learn more!