Happy New Year from Your New Privacy Ally GPT!

Another trip around the Sun, but the hurly-burly's far from done, so another inbox and LinkedIn full of alerts from every law and consulting firm and vendor, even a professor or two. Some of them are quite useful for what they purport to be: year in review, prioritization, even prediction. You've been around; you know the good ones; you know too what they're missing, and why.

Here at the Hybrid Intelligencer, the good ones are a flowering of data for a new witches' brew to create what comes NEXT after alerts. Here I have new tech tools and the hard-won freedom of speech to see in that data the semantic and symbolic relationships that link our professional lives to the greatest outrages, tragedies, threats and opportunities that surround us. I do so to forge creative, imperfect tools to help make our lives more meaningful, to explore complex realities and create and then criticize useful rough drafts of possible futures, to gather up the detritus of expert summaries and subject it to criticism from every angle, to play with it until it has sufficient credibility and usefulness for us and/or our organizations, and then at best to propose something new causing unavoidable discomfort among entrenched interests and powers that be.

So here today is another new way, a GPT that gathers the summaries and predictions in privacy regulation and law, AI governance, and cybersecurity threats and their regulation (including my own and others I admire), and asks you to treat them not as pronouncements but as tires to kick, sacred cows to melt down into useful tools and swords to beat into plowshares, conversation starters toward a more productive conversation. It does so by criticizing its own responses and encouraging further criticism from the user. Without further ado, here is your 2024 Privacy Ally!

Your Privacy Ally is a lot more fun at parties than a legal alert, because it will keep learning from its discussions with us, from the knowledge I keep feeding it, and from its regular real time, semantic web search. I'm kidding about fun, of course; I know well how impossible your job is, now that as predicted you are tasked with AI on top of privacy and related cybersecurity; and your Ally is designed to be there for you in the most challenging times as well.

Here's hoping, though, that over the next week or so you get some time to kick back, celebrate another trip around the Sun, reflect on or forget the battle lost and won, and if like me you are beginning to enjoy exchanges with generative AI, perhaps pay a visit to your 2024 Privacy Ally to share in the creation of our possible futures. Happy New Year!