Another article on AI?!? Kinda

So, I don't normally write as much as I am currently. Many maybe thinking - yes, and it was better that way! But, I was told to write a view on AI as apparently it's the 'talk of the town'.

There are people who are better experts than me, our own Mark Stent for one. (Apparently tagging him on this article is also a wise move) so I'll leave the details and more interesting, what apps to use and how to use AI to him. However, I do have a view.

When I was younger, I remember the excitement of the 'calculator watch' brought out by Casio. Not like the image above thankfully, it did fit on the wrist. I just kept the image it because it made me smile and I used AI. The Casio watch seemed to be something next level. (That was until another watch came out that could tell you your heart rate - before Apple, Garmin and Oura). I remember putting it on and then trying to show my Dad how it worked. He was terrified to break it. He didn't want to touch the buttons in case it didn't go back to the beginning. Not something a young person really cared about. He wasn't someone unused to technology as he was at the time using computers (BBC/Acorn/PC) as part of setting up a unit for the blind at the high school he worked at. But, the watch felt alien to him and not quite something he wanted to damage.

My own first experience of that feeling was with Snapchat. The UX design clearly wasn't for me. The only people I could invite to experiment with were my nieces and nephews and they definitely didn't need me sending them snaps. Other people were playing around with the filters but there was no way I could convince anyone my age to use it because the experience felt so alien at the time. Ironically, many of them now regularly use it. But it was the initial shock that I just didn't quite get it.

I feel that AI is a bit like that for a lot of people. It's a new thing that we don't quite know what to do with. It is also, for me, one of the first technologies I've played around with that seems to benefit experience over youth. Mainly, because in it's current state you need to know what you are doing to actually judge what it gives you as being good. If you don't have that grounding it's very easy to accept what you get as a great answer. Personally, I'm using it out of curiosity and that it does speed up a lot of the work that I'm doing - it has certainly made Warc a more useful search engine.

Which leaves me to think that it's the people who are curious that'll discover the best way's to use it. It's the people who do laugh at it and yet somehow manage to create something newer, better and faster than we thought before. And maybe, and this is a bit random it'll mean we have some extra time for ourselves and maybe create the next version of Test Cricket. I mean, how else would you create such a great game, unless you were wondering how to kill time over 5 days and then require a few trips to countries not particularly close to remain in the Summer all year round. Love to get thoughts on this as always.

#AI #Strategy #Agencyvoices