Am I Managing AI or is AI Managing Me
When ChatGPT first launched, I was slow on the uptake. As you will see, I am always slow on the uptake. Sometimes that serves me well, other times not so much. Remind me to tell you what I thought about the Internet in 1994, or maybe don’t. It is still too soon.
But once I got over my severe aversion to the fact that they used “Chat” in the name (seriously, who does that Snap), and finally looked at the tool, I knew that everything had changed.
I also suspected that nothing had changed, Yep, we’re still humans and we still do human things. Clever, dumb, compassionate, cruel, you know, the whole gamut of the things that humans do.
My first thought was this is so cool…And my second thought an instant later was that this AI thing would make a great conference. I saw topics everywhere. Who’s going to manage this? Who is going to use this? How are you going to get a return on investment? Is every organization going to have their own AI? Or will there just be a few big vendors? Will the AIs be compatible? Yeah, right! How will you choose which AI to use? Will the IT department suddenly rebrand itself to become the AI department totally catching the Office of Corporate Innovation by complete surprise. You know that happens sometimes.
I was so full of excitement, I immediately emailed my half-baked ideas for a conference to the legendary Chris Brogan because it was Sunday morning and he ALWAYS answers emails from his subscribers. Unsurprisingly, he responded but somewhat surprisingly, he was enthusiastic about the concept. I took that as real validation.
But as I started looking into the practical considerations of launching a conference on a topic so big and broad in such a noisy and competitive landscape, I knew that I didn’t have the resources to pull off a conference of that scale. But fast-forward a couple of years and now I feel confident that I have the resources to launch a Substack and not just because everybody is doing it. Substack is a perfect platform to explore those very practical AI questions that go under the radar in the general media and leave conference rooms empty. This Substack will not be about OpenAI said this, Anthropic said that and we’re waiting for a big announcement from Google. It won’t be particularly technical either, but it will focus on the very human issues of AI.
How do individuals use it? Is AI a glorified personal digital assistant, like the Palm Pilot of the 2020s or is it something more. How do organizations use it? What are the policies? Policies? You mean, we need policies? Does AI information get stored somewhere? Does it have to? Are there legal issues?
I know that I don’t have all the answers. I will surely be consulting Claude.AI, who I want to give a shout out to for encouraging me to do this (AI managing me), ChatGPT, CoPilot, Gemini as well as actual humans that really do know important and relevant stuff that will make this newsletter fun to create and hopefully equally fun to read. Stay tuned for next week’s issue which will focus on what is productivity and what does AI have to do with it anyway.
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