Trust in the time of AI
Who decides the rules?
Friends,
This week marks the sixth year anniversary of this newsletter. I’m not sure what I intended of this when I began it, but for those of you who have been with me since the beginning, I hope that you have enjoyed the journey so far and what this newsletter has become. For my new friends, I hope that you find value in what this newsletter is - a missive into today and what’s to come. I endeavour to find a voice in and amongst this evolving world.
Amongst multiple discussions this week, AI featured prominently - in more ways than one. The way that I see it is that there is a bunch of swirl. People are trying to figure out what they can do with tools like ChatGPT, linking with tools to create new workflows. When I saw Zapier’s integrations, my mind went into overdrive. To what degree could we utilise AI to automate our jobs? After 6 years of writing this newsletter, do you trust that this email has been written by me or an AI? Who has been curating, reading, summarising and writing all along?
At a very simple level, educators are worried about plagiarism - and thus how might one raise ethical standards when it comes to students? My view is that education needs to embrace the technology to rework the very nature of education. How do you think of education/the workplace/life and leverage the power of AI over the coming years? But there is also the other view. AI holds much power that could dictate over very future. OpenAI’s founder recently said of the best case for AI:
“I think the best case is so good that it’s hard to imagine … I think the good case is just so unbelievably good that you sound like a crazy person talking about it. I think the worst case is lights-out for all of us.”
We talk about accuracy, efficiency and applicability of AI but the fundamental question remains not whether this can happen, but rather how should they be used and to what degree. Responsible AI innovation has been central to the AI movement to date and I can see this taking centre stage going forward as we move from a singular usage route to multiple applications:
GATO, which is described as a generalist agent by inventors DeepMind, is an important development because whereas currently powerful algorithms do one or two things exceedingly well, GATO can do many. This includes playing Atari, titling images, chatting with users, stacking blocks using a robotic arm and more.
This is beyond the simplicity of decisions that industries need to make, today right now. Medium cited “Do not submit anything written solely using a generative AI tool. When using a generative AI tool to create any portion of your submission, you must cite it like any other source” as part of its writing cooperative guidelines - and Buzzfeed’s shares more than doubled when it said it would rely on ChatGPT creator OpenAI to enhance its quizzes and personalize some content for its audiences, becoming the latest digital publisher to embrace artificial intelligence.
The speed of change is blistering. Artificial Intelligence is evolving faster than the courts can evaluate how laws apply to it. What is right and what is wrong? How exactly the AI was trained and operates will be the main issues as we look at copyright infringement, in content. Proving infringement is a two-step process. The plaintiff must demonstrate that copying occurred; and that the copying is unlawful, because the defendant copied too much of the plaintiff’s protected expression and is, therefore, substantially similar. We will be looking to prove evidence of copying, the instructions given to copy, the data on which the AI was trained -and the list will continue.
Big tech has been slow to market - but ChatGPT has caused big tech to wake up and as ethicists debate what’s right or wrong, the new rush to market will result in more deep fakes and inaccurate data - and more questions about right and wrong. Trust will remain central to each use case, but it is the societal impact that innovations can have on the world.
My concern with AI is less about the incidents of plagiarism, of figuring out who did what to whom with what. My concern is about unleashing power. One example OpenAI has hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete. Will that immediately render roles redundant? I doubt it - but it’s the kind of ballpark that we are now in. What’s right? What’s wrong? And who decides the rules? Whether you believe that AI is snake oil of groundbreaking, it is certainly destabalising and forcing a rethink.
Stay Curious,
Here are my recommendations for this week:
Now
What the Longest Study on Human Happiness found is the key to a good life -
This Harvard Study of Adult Development has established a strong correlation between deep relationships and well-being. Relationships keep us happier and healthier throughout our life spans. We neglect our connections with others at our peril. Investing in our social fitness is possible each day, each week of our lives. Even small investments today in our relationships with others can create long-term ripples of well-being. The question is, how does a person nurture those deep relationships.
Ranked: The Top 50 Most Visited Websites in the World - If we were to rank all of these websites according to their traffic numbers, we would see a classic power law distribution. At the low end, the vast majority of these websites would be inactive, receiving little to no traffic. On the upper end of the ranking though, a handful of websites receive the lion’s share of internet traffic. This is the reality of visitation.
Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you - Google, then Microsoft, then Amazon also began a fresh round of job cuts that eliminated roles from their orgs. This is a reset of big tech amidst this new economical downturn post an uncertain period in the world. It’s not you, it’s not them. It’s a new world.
10 Nutrition Myths Experts Wish Would Die - Soy milk can raise the risk of breast cancer. Fat-free foods are healthier than high-fat foods. Vegans and vegetarians are deficient in protein. Some false ideas about nutrition seem to linger in culture like a terrible song stuck in your head. So to set the record straight, the New York Times asked 10 of the top nutrition experts a simple question: What is one nutrition myth you wish would go away — and why? This is what they said.
The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think - Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is insufficient, but alternatives are coming into view and changing our understanding of the disease. Someday the gold standard for care won’t be just one treatment — it will be a set of diagnostic tools that can determine the best therapeutic approach to an individual patient’s depression, be it cognitive behavioral therapy, lifestyle changes, neuromodulation, avoiding genetic triggers, talk therapy, medication or some combination thereof.
Next
The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok - This is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
A CEO’s guide to the metaverse - It’s too big to ignore—yet its future is far from certain. Companies need to dip a toe in the water and plan to take the plunge should developments warrant.
Why VR/AR Gets Farther Away as It Comes Into Focus - As we observe the state of XR in 2023, it’s fair to say the technology has proved harder than many of the best-informed and most financially endowed companies expected. Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok demonstrated that you could still launch social networks and media services as many as seven years after the smartphone, though none displaced Facebook, which debuted years before the iPhone or Android. What of the Metaverse? Time will tell.
Duolingo Transformed Me Into a Monster - That green owl is haunting me! This is a story about a lot of things. It's about Duolingo. That's obvious. That's in the headline. But it's actually a story about doing the wrong things for the wrong reason.
Netflix’s New Chapter - The simplified story of Netflix’s founding starts with Reed Hastings grumbling over a $40 late charge from Blockbuster, and ends with the brick-and-mortar giant going bankrupt as customers came to prefer online rentals from Netflix, with streaming providing the final coup de grâce.
Neither are quite right. It’s impossible to not dive into the history of Netflix and not come away with a deep appreciation for everything Hastings accomplished. I’m not sure there is any company of Netflix’s size that has ever been so frequently doubted and written off. To have built it to a state where simply having the best content is paramount is a massive triumph.
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