Battle of the AI Bots

I’m going to take a break from my python journey to dive back into artificial intelligence (AI) and what I’m calling the battle of the AI bots.

Previously, I have posted about 4 common AI fallicies and how AI is NOT going to take over the world.

Well, regarding the world takeover, I’ve changed my thinking somewhat, based on ChatGPT, a recent article on AI email, and some reflections on human nature (which was influenced by watching too many back-to-back episodes of the first season of Alone).

The article, How AI Could Transform Email, talks about how AI might change email by:

• rewriting “work emails so they sound like* Jerry Seinfeld”
• enabling people “to further rely on autocomplete functions while sending emails” – instead of thinking for themselves and communicating THEIR thoughts
• adding AI functions to help us with ‘overstuffed mailboxes”
• allowing AI to respond to our emails while we focus on more productive work.

*This made me think about how the head of our audit department suggested that we should explore using ChatGPT to write audit reports. Maybe she’s thinking that if used AI to write the reports from the business unit’s perspective rather than the “audit cop: gotcha!” perspective, audit issues would get more traction. I don’t think we write from the cop perspective,  but I’d hate to spend time fact-checking that AI prose; getting signoff on the audit facts is hard enough.

And how do we upload that highly-sensitive audit issue information to the Internet without it get exposed?

So this means I can just have my email bot correspond to your email bot, and when my bot thinks the situation is to my advantage, then it texts my phone that it is time for me to step in and actually deal with with the issue. Or it decides I don’t need to be bothered.

Won’t that be fun, having an approval on a critical part of a project rescinded 2 weeks later because the CISO realized what his bot approved?

Scheduled Intelligence

WordPress allows you to write a blog post and schedule it for publication on a schedule (that’s what I do). But what if your bot is writing and posting for you? Will it also create wacky pics to go with each post?

Using my current blog posts to train on, AI will issues blog posts once a week with snarky comments, with an occasional “ACL is dying” post (I hope it checks whether ACL is dead first). I’d like to think I’m intelligent and funny already, but I guess we’ll see….

On the serious side, you know those people at work that post thoughtful stuff on the company Teams channels occasionally? Well, once the bots start posting for us, those messages will be just like photographs are today–most of them are beautiful, but you know they aren’t real, so you discount them. Maybe it’s just management trying to spin us into the correct mood and away from the company benefits they are removing {<bot-training:snarky_comment_tag>).

Is that what our email, blog posts, Teams messages, texts, etc. will become? Something we not longer pay attention to?

Conclusion

So here’s my concerns about giving AI more access to our lives:

1) We will grow stupider and more passive (machine-dependent).

Look how much we already depend on our phones. I ask you, how many young people can read a real road map or use an Atlas? So if you phone dies, what do you do? If the solution is wait until your phone is charged, I think that’s a ridiculous answer.

2) Eventually life will be lived mostly by the bots; we will be standing on the sidelines waiting for some THING to tell us what to do next, when, and how.

I am not against AI.

I am not concerned AI will take over, because it won’t have to–many people will gladly grant AI a leadership role to make their lives more simple and pleasurable.

I think relationships and friendships are one of life’s greatest pleasures, but if we turn most of the communication over to the bots, what will we have left? That’s easy: textual relationships!

At that point, AI will be more intelligent than us, because we will have replaced thinking with responding.

So the real problem is not the technology, and it never will be. It’s the humans and their choices. Same old story.

God, help us.

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