Have you heard that artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally change life as we know it? That’s the word from the pundits, and I believe they are correct. The question is whether AI will be a force for good or destruction. 

To pump the flames of doom and gloom, the media is telling you that millions will be put out of work. Understandably, you’re likely concerned about your future, but maybe losing your job is the least of your worries. You’ve seen the movies. Wasn’t Terminator about an AI gone amok that wanted to wipe humanity from the face of the earth? Of course there’s angst, and rightfully so. Scientists have a nasty habit of doing something before an ethicist asks them whether they should. 

Hopefully, when I’ve finished discussing this topic, we can all, to paraphrase Stanley Kubrick’s alternate title to “Dr. Strangelove,” stop worrying and learn to love AI.

What is AI? I asked an AI large language model or LLM to describe AI in simple terms, and this is what it produced. 

“AI, or artificial intelligence, is when computers are designed to think and act like humans. It means teaching machines to do tasks that usually require human intelligence, like learning from experience, solving problems, understanding language or recognizing images. For example, AI is what powers things like voice assistants, recommendation systems on streaming apps, or even self-driving cars. It’s like giving computers the ability to “think” and make decisions based on data.”

What’s a large language model (LLM), you ask? Well, it’s the heart of one of the types of AI engines. 

“An LLM, or large language model, is a type of AI that’s really good at understanding and generating human language. It’s like a super-smart chatbot that’s been trained on tons of text data to learn how words, sentences and ideas fit together. It can answer questions, write stories, or even have conversations by predicting what words come next based on what it’s learned. Think of it as a brainy tool that mimics how people talk and write!”

Whether you know it or not, you’re already using it. It showed up as feature on your cellphone or computer. Ever notice when you’re typing on your phone and it anticipates the next word, offering a couple of suggestions? That’s AI at work, reading what you’ve written and suggesting the next word based upon a large language model. 

Publicly available AI systems still haven’t mastered human intuition, a function of the brain that we still don’t fully understand; the ability to make leaps in reasoning, leveraging the brain’s unconscious pattern recognition. That’s the aspiration, to master this level of reasoning. 

The point isn’t to fear AI, but rather to be wary of AI. It’s not going to stop, and it’s only going to become more sophisticated, likely one day becoming smarter than all of us combined. Which brings us to the most tangible concern about AI,=: influence. 

It’s already at work, and usually, you won’t even realize it is happening. For example, you could be provided incorrect or skewed answers from queries. Some AI clients have been shown to offer answers that lean one way politically or another. Likewise, access to bad data can offer false responses. If you don’t know much about the topic in question, you can easily be led astray. 

My biggest caution is to check the work. Based on the current state of AI and the various versions available, don’t offer it 100% trust just because it’s AI. Always verify. 

I’m often asked whether I’m concerned that AI will take my job away as a writer, and my simple answer is, “No.” AI will certainly help those who are intimidated by writing or with writing tasks that many would consider repetitive. Essentially, LLMs are a really fast search engine, what I call “trash in, trash out.” Someone has to feed that trash into the system for AI to mine, and that’s me. As long as I continue to create new content, I will have value, and people will read what I’ve got to share. Likewise, the various LLMs will mine my data to create their amalgamated summaries of data. 

Despite all of these concerns, AI has introduced some good as well. There are already people using AI tools to enhance their business. They’ve created business plans, analyzed resumes, written press releases and drawn custom images. 

For me, the most astonishing capability of readily accessible AI clients is the ability to draw or create complex art from a simple prompt. I asked Grok to draw “using AI for fun and profit” and it created a drawing with a cat riding on the back of a rainbow unicorn. It was so ludicrous; I chose to not share it in this article.

We can use AI from our desktop computers, and even our cell phones. But for more sophisticated computations, you need access to mainframe computers that require lots of power and produce lots of heat. Fortunately, you can rent access to these machines rather than having to buy your own. 

Considering it’s good and bad, AI is a complex issue that is so big that I’d never be able to address it all in one entry. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the myriad ways AI will transform society in the coming years. Consequently, I’ll be covering this subject over several submissions to Tactical Retailer. Look for installments discussing small business use of AI, government/military applications of AI, how data fits into the scheme and finally, future business opportunities AI will present. 

In closing, I’d like to disclose that I used AI while conducting research for this article. Quite frankly, it was faster than using Google to do simple searches and wade through all of the junk, and that’s where AI shines. Everything remains written in my voice and analyzed and presented by me.