What does the future hold for generative AI?

Welcome back to the Evolving Workplace Newsletter, where we will explore the changing nature of teams, collaboration, and the future of work.?

If this is your first step toward the future design of work, you can learn more about me and what I do here .

I want to begin today’s newsletter with a story I recently told to my daughter:

Once upon a time, in a small farmyard, there lived a chicken named Fred. Fred was a curious and adventurous chicken, who loved to explore the world around him.

One day, Fred was wandering through the fields, pecking at the ground and searching for tasty bugs to eat. As he was walking, he came across a bright red apple that had fallen from a nearby tree. Fred had never seen an apple before, and he was fascinated by its smooth and shiny skin.

Without hesitation, Fred grabbed the apple in his beak and took a big bite. The juicy and sweet fruit was like nothing he had ever tasted before, and Fred was instantly hooked. He ate the entire apple, seeds and all, and then he went in search of more.

Fred spent the rest of the day exploring the fields, looking for apples to eat. He found many more apples, and he ate them all with great gusto. By the end of the day, Fred was so full of apples that he could hardly walk.

But Fred didn’t mind. He was happy and content, and he had discovered a new and delicious food that he loved. From that day on, Fred became known as the apple-loving chicken, and he spent his days wandering the fields in search of the perfect apple.

The end.

What’s so special about this story? Is it some kind of parable about chickens and apples? If so, I’m having trouble finding the message other than apples are delicious and chickens can enjoy them, too.?

What makes this story special isn’t the content (the story was about Fred liking apples, but I would have been equally happy if Fred took a rocket to the moon), but the story itself. I used AI to generate a children’s story about a chicken named Fred for my four year old daughter - and she liked it.?

In Jasper: This Blog Post (Mostly) Wrote Itself , generative AI is pitched as a tool for businesses and individual creators “to break through writer’s block, create original art, and repackage content for format, language and tone.” After providing Jasper with some context and the desired tone, it “can write a 1,500-word blog post, emails for a targeted marketing campaign or multiple scroll-stopping headlines for an ecommerce store’s Instagram ads” in minutes.

I understand how this could bring up wariness for writers, but it also has the potential to free people up to generate work that requires a human touch, while leaving behind some of the more mind-numbing filler work that takes up so much of our time.

Additionally, generative AI is just as fallible as the humans that created it. It still needs people to input ideas and edit the results. In Ethan Mollick’s Harvard Business Review article, ChatGPT Is a Tipping Point for AI , he describes AI as a “consummate bullshitter,” saying, “It literally does not know what it doesn’t know, because it is, in fact, not an entity at all, but rather a complex algorithm generating meaningful sentences.” It also brings to mind Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble, where she explores “how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms.” Any biases or prejudices that AI creators have can easily end up programmed into their products. These could be as serious as those outlined by Noble or as innocuous as those created by alphabetical lists (I remember seeing ads for “AAAAA Plumbing” back when we had yellow pages).

But in areas where AI does know more, or can generate material significantly faster than humans, what’s the harm in seeing what we can discover? In the agricultural industry, John Deere has been investing in automation and AI research for decades, and as a result, they’re changing the future of farming. They’re re-imagining the driver’s cab of a tractor “by integrating real-time weather data, individual pre-settings and job management procedures” and developing technology to reduce the use of pesticides by implementing AI that can recognize “the difference between cultivated plants and weeds so that individual plants can be specifically treated.” These tasks were once left entirely to humans, but this technology will allow farmers to focus on other areas that require their attention. And John Deere assures their customers, “Whatever happens in the future, the farmer will always be in control.”

I understand that other industries introduce different complications. In the art world, if what I want is something pleasant to look at, maybe I don’t care whether a person or a program actually thought about the composition and painted it, but if I do care about the art as an act, then it’s very different. People aren't going to stop making art, but this will significantly impact the way that we market and profit from it, which leads me to ask, do consumers share responsibility in keeping human artists working?

I played around with Hotpot’s AI art generator and returned to Fred the Chicken, pictured here:

I scrolled down to Hotpot’s FAQs while I waited and was interested in this point, “Decades ago, only the elite could write, read, and enjoy running water. Years ago, only the wealthy could use computers. Technology cured these crippling inequalities, each time transforming elite lifestyles into normal ones. Art is an incredible skill and requires immense talent, but the ability to draw is only accessible to a precious few. Expression is a core human value. AI promises to bring expression to all.”

This brought me back to Ethan Mollick’s HBR article , where he points out that, when AI players mastered the game Go, human players studied and learned from the AI and became “unprecedentedly better players themselves .”

Generative AI has polarizing connotations. In Michael Spencer’s Artificial Intelligence Report newsletter, he says, “There will be two kinds of companies at the end of this decade... Those that are fully utilizing AI, and those that are out of business.” For others, the knee jerk reaction is, “The machines are coming for our jobs!” ala our friend here:

There’s also the very real concern of regulation around AI, something we’re seeing in all kinds of industries that are rapidly progressing into uncharted territory like the metaverse and cryptocurrency.?

For me, the real question isn’t whether AI is good or bad, but where is it going to have a meaningful effect?

?

The world is changing, and so is the workplace. Subscribe to The Evolving Workplace Newsletter to learn more about the changing nature of teams, collaboration, and the future of the workplace, or connect with me via email: [email protected] .?