AI: Bane or Boon?

AI seems to be a hot item for business owners, but consumers see it as bread that's only half baked and employees view it as the bane of their existence. Who's right?

Like the label "gluten free" on a bottle of water, AI seems to be showing up in places where nobody asked for it and its usefulness is flimsy at best. But in other cases it's literally saving lives.

The current topic of AI — artificial intelligence — is a hot button issue that has many facets, some overt and others nuanced.

From a business owner's perspective, there seems to be a rush toward adoption of AI whether it's appropriate or not. Damn the loss-of-employee-engagement torpedoes, full steam ahead!

Sometimes AI makes sense, sometimes not.

The Usefulness of AI

AI can provide tremendous savings on some operational costs. Many of today's AIs are essentially Large Language Models — LLMs — that have consumed massive quantities of documents and text, both legally (free and open-source) and illegally (copyrighted works), and arguably show the most promise in their ability to produce new documents.

The state of today's AI in generating visual works still leaves a lot to be desired. People with six fingers is a classic 'tell' that an AI was used to produce an image.

For example, the legal field is learning that the production of contracts and other legal documents, many of which are just variations of standardized templates that are customized to suit the specific needs of the client or case, can be cost-effectively shifted to computer-generated versions. A qualified human being reviews the document to make sure it's correct, but the computers handle much of the tedious and time-consuming work.

In other cases, we have AIs spitting out articles for news organizations that don't provide anything new or informative to the reader, they're just rehashes of other content that some other AI-driven organization spit out. This can result in a repeat loop where unsubstantiated rumors or flat-out lies are spread as if they're gospel.

Sometimes these platforms have their algorithms deliberately skewed to ignore news items that contradict a particular viewpoint while playing up other pieces that perpetuate an already flawed, skewed, or overtly incorrect position.

We are seeing the misuse of AI-driven algorithms in the slippery-slope skewing of entire social media platforms.

Is this skewing of information the fault of AIs? Arguably, no.

Garbage In, Garbage out

Artificial intelligence and its application can't [yet] be smarter than the programmers who build it and the content managers who feed and grow it. With great power comes great responsibility and deliberately tilting the AI's internal algorithms one way or another has profound and world-wide consequences.

Quasi-political issues aside, the use of AI within an organization is a complex issue with many pros and cons, all depending on a particular view point.

For example, the benefit of using an AI to produce written content can be a huge cost saving to business owners, but can destroy the livelihood of the employees it replaces.

Not many staff writers can retrain overnight to become programmers down at the local AI plant.

(The irony is that a lot of those laid-off writer's copyrighted works are often illegally fed into AIs to train the large language models that put them out of a job.)

Mixed Benefits and Harm of AI

AI can be profoundly beneficial. Medical researchers are developing AI models that provide substantial improvements in the accuracy of medical diagnoses. In some cases, they can detect the presence of disease based on a suite of symptoms with high degrees of accuracy when human doctors struggle to correctly fit those pieces together.

Conversely, the deliberate skewing of AI algorithms within health insurance companies has been shown to deny medically necessary health care claims that would otherwise save lives. This is a situation where the tool isn't the issue, the driver of putting profits and shareholder value over lives is the source of harm.

At their core, AI's and their children machine learning and expert systems, can provide huge benefits both to organizations and to the net consumer at the end of those organizations' food chain. Computers have been used since their invention — and is the original reason for their invention — as an increasingly powerful tool.

Heavy Lifting

Computers excel at offloading tedious and often repetitive tasks from humans in highly efficient and accurate ways. Automation is the classic example of how computers aid humankind.

Computers are the most complex thing humans have ever invented. With great complexity comes ... great complexity.

Like a lot of things, "It depends" is the correct answer to the question, "Should AI be used in business?" And, like a lot of other things, that answer depends on perspective.

An AI used appropriately and effectively within your customer service apparatus can provide a lot of time savings to existing customers who need an answer to a common question about your product or service. If your AI "chat bot" isn't effectively implemented, however, your customers will get frustrated and spend their money with a competitor who either has a more effective AI, or more likely is the one who has a real person answering the phone.

AI can be used to process and analyze information in an efficient and [hopefully] accurate way that would normally take a human, however qualified they may be, an overly expensive amount of time to analyze the old fashioned way.

Like in the legal field, AI can do the tedious stuff that takes a long time but doesn't require years of skill and experience, freeing up that qualified staff member to manage things at a higher level — things that provide a higher cost-benefit to the organization.

The Question of AI in Your Business

In the end, the use of AI within your organization is something that must be evaluated in the context of your strategic and tactical objectives. Consider these questions:

• What are the hard costs to implement it?
• What are the soft costs?
• Will it mean letting some staff go?
• Will it degrade the engagement and loyalty of existing staff who remain on your team, causing costly turnover?
• How will your customers react to your use of AI?
• Will it genuinely improve their experience with your product or service, or is it just slapping a "gluten free" label on a bottle of water?

AI is like a hammer, a tool that is very effective at pounding nails into wood, but it also excels at smashing thumbs. The trick is to be smart enough to know where to swing it and how hard.