It has been said that Artificial Intelligence is the wave of the future. In just the last 90 days ChatGPT, Google Bard and Bing's AI Chatbot have taken over news and social media streams. Everyone who's anyone has found a way to use these "services" to enhance their daily lives. 

But how is it enhancing your lives? And at what cost? Who is really benefitting from the technology? I know, I know. You're thinking I'm against the technology, I've probably never used it to benefit myself. A stark advocate against skynet, etc. But that's not true. I'm actually acutely aware of how helpful this technology can be, even to me.

I write a lot of Mac Code for projects I work on, my fair share of powershell and bash scripts. One of my least favorite things is to get stuck with a line of errors and have to google search my way through endless forums and technical articles to pull out a specific fix that almost never makes sense and requires lots of elbow grease to find the actual result i'm in need of.

Open AI's ChatGPT is wonderful for cutting through the noise and presenting solutions in a very easy to understand way. I love being able to tell the Chatbot - I don't understand or that didn't work and it spits out an alternative solution preceeded by an apology for forgetting something about the code above it. I love that I'm cutting down wasted time and coming to solutions faster.

But it's worth noting, I am not uploading a single piece of code that's proprietary. I'm not handing it data that tells it anything about me. I'm stripping out all the data above and below the single line of code I'm working on, and I replace any custom text with a generic placeholder. The reality is that this tool I really enjoy using - has no filter. What I give it - it will use in any other person's questions. Any other user's code can include information I've given it. If I were to upload my contact list and ask it to sort it removing all duplicates, it would do a great job...And then anyone who asked for anyone's name on that list, could get their contact info from it. Scary.

Google Bard announced today that they too are offering ways to enhance coding techniques and will "help" me write better software code and design apps, and websites, and book reports, and so on and so on. The dilemma for a consultant like me is to effectively communicate how dangerous this is without guardrails. Just last week a major computer company was breached becuase their engineers uploaded a bunch of proprietary code into ChatGPT without scrubbing it first and it resulted in a breach.

Now think about your staff, do they read the fine print before they download a game to their phones? Do they stop and think before they click on a phishing email? Do they roll through stop signs on their way to a meeting late? Yeah. Scary. Artifical Intelligence Chat bots make it easy to give away corporate secrets. Too easy for my taste.

Do I think they should be abandoned. Of course not. But, we should learn the risks and how to use them effectively without forgetting they are basically databases with a face. They are eating anything you put into them and then profiting off sharing it with someone else. Last week the author of GDPR sued Open.AI because the model used for ChatGPT-4 has no way to remove user data from its database. Once the data is in - whether it's true or not - it's locked in. This means someone can report news as true and even if it's false, anyone who asks the Chatbot for a fact - will have that misinformation reported as True.

It's a slippery slope.