The Trials and Travails of AI

Lately, I’ve been pestered by a slew of mysterious people purporting to run Internet based book clubs. You see, as a world-famous author, I am at the forefront of this new, insidious invader. No, I’m not talking about the emerald ash borer of last decade, I’m talking about the new-fangled Nigerian Prince scam. This one targets a pathetically optimistic group with stars in their eyes…writers.

Thanks to the sad ubiquity of AI, these fraudsters now use AI bots to do their skullduggery. The bots scour the internet for authors, send enthusiastic emails, reply to the replies, and search for suckers, er excuse me, I mean writers willing to pay for a nonexistent service. Amazingly, these “people” have zero internet presence, which is odd when you consider they claim to have fabulously large networks of internet-based readers! Check out this article if you are interested in learning more.

Return of the Nigerian Prince Redux: Beware Book Club and Book Review Scams – Writer Beware

AI isn’t going away, and it will have a place, but I suspect the way we are currently extrapolating its uses will be different from how we use it in the future. In the early days of radio, for those who were not around when that technology was commercialized a century ago, its backers thought radio would broadcast advertisements all day, and if they were unable to sell a time slot here and there, music would be used to fill the gaps. The inverse became the norm. Radio broadcast music (and other content) and fitted in some advertisements here and there to support the programming.

The problems with AI, as I have written many times, are as follows: 1) machine messiah complex (the belief the machine is infallible), 2) fraudulent uses, and 3) the loss of human learning that comes from doing. Many people misunderstand this commentary (perhaps they’ve become too reliant on AI!). I am not criticizing the technology as much as I am criticizing how the technology is used by humans.

Here are four recent anecdotes:

• I recently met with some accountants. One of the guys said he interviewed three people for a job. Two of the thank you emails he received were exactly the same. The lesson? AI is fancy plagiarism. That’s a form of fraud.
• I had an email exchange with a business friend. He said he’s been using AI to help write articles. He likes it…but said he has to check everything, and worse, one of the bots added a politically laden paragraph espousing views he does not hold. The lesson? AI, like any piece of technology, is beholden to the biases of its programmers. The taproot of this issue is the loss of human learning. My friend is too dependent upon technology to do his work.
• In my own firm, we recently received a warning not to use AI when creating materials that use proprietary information. The lesson? You can’t trust AI to maintain confidentiality. Any information poured into the borg feeds the borg. Why? Because AI is fancy plagiarism. It does not create in the sense of human creation, it repurposes what exists and regurgitates it as its own creation, yet another form of fraud.
• Another business contact told me his wife had a phone interview. She enjoyed a great back and forth with the interviewer, and at the end, the interviewer offered her the job! Right there, on the spot! The interviewer also asked for her bank information. She was about to provide it, but by this time, she became suspicious and asked her husband for his opinion. The interviewer wasn’t a person. It was an AI bot. A magnificently lifelike AI bot that almost fooled some very intelligent people. The lesson? AI is used for fraudulent purposes, and worse, discerning truth from AI fiction is becoming more difficult.

“Who here likes AI?” is a question I regularly pose to others. Most people reply, “I do!”. Then I ask them if they enjoy having an email exchange with an AI bot masquerading as a human. No one does. And this is the problem: everyone wants to be the smartest guy in the room and have others react to their use of AI, but no one wants to be on the receiving end of someone else’s AI. Even venture capital firms seeking AI investments will make sure anyone who contacts them is an actual human!

On the opposite end of this AI infused madness and fraud, I had a minor issue with a credit card. I called the bank, and amazingly, a human answered my call. He introduced himself and said he’s from Virginia. He had my information on his screen. After I confirmed my identity, he resolved this issue in less than a minute. Prerecorded messages or an AI bot would have taken far longer. The human touch is still preferred. Well…unless that was the greatest AI bot I’ve encountered.

The wife told me a family friend recently used AI to draft cover letters and edit her resume to fit different positions. Of the 180 AI infused resumes and letters she sent, she received two replies. That’s it. I suspect many of the other job seekers are now doing this same thing, using AI to tailor-make their overtures. So, guess what? AI perfection is the new white noise. It’s a background buzz, indistinguishable from other users, and perhaps, identical to the output of those others. I told her to tell the friend to skip the AI and instead start each email with a comment that the missive was written by her, without the use of AI.

Fancy AI tech will have a place, but those who retain an actual human touch will be the ones who stand out. In a world of sameness, a little irreverence will go a long way. Write it yourself, do not fall pray to the lazy trappings of easy output. Do the work. I am now adding the following to much of my communication:

To write is to think. To expedite that process removes introspection and creativity. Human connections will not be made and instead will be replaced by engineered plagiarism.