How do I know people are concerned, maybe even fearful, about artificial intelligence today?

Because those emotions show up in the most unexpected places.

Last week, after I delivered a 30-minute speech at a conference, a person asked me if AI had written my speech.

Like what?

How can that be a question you ask after seeing a person speak in front of a room full of fellow industry professionals?

But it sure was. Whammo. Did you write that or did a machine write it?

I expected questions about my topic or maybe the conclusions I reached. But not whether the words were mine or not.

The question took me from confident to rattled in about 2.5 seconds.

The more I thought, though, the more I realized the question wasn’t about me. Instead, that question says a lot about how our friends and neighbors see the world today.

And it’s a lesson we should heed right now. Because if people can’t trust what they see and hear first hand, I’m very concerned about what might be in store for us.

That’s Not Cricket

So, did I use AI to write my speech?

Yes.

AI is my thinking partner. It’s extremely useful when I need to find hidden angles, surface hidden connections, or push myself to go further.

AI, ChatGPT specifically, helped me organize my thoughts into a speech outline. I knew what I wanted to talk about, but I struggled getting everything into a cohesive, coherent structure.

Once I had the outline, I wrote the last five minutes of the speech.

Me. Sitting at a keyboard. Banging on a Word doc.

From there, I wrote the opening. I came up with the transitions between sections. And then I polished it.

Did AI help me?

You’re damn right it did, and I’m not going to apologize for it any more than a golfer should apologize for using the designed course they play on.

A golfer doesn’t walk out to a 150-acre open field and start from scratch. They don’t mow the grass, dig the bunkers, and plant the flags. Instead, the tees, fairways, and greens are all laid out for them.

Effectively, I used AI to do the same thing.

I don’t have a problem with that.

Do you?

No One Right Answer

Maybe you do.

Maybe you’ve cleansed your Spotify playlists of AI-created songs, never watch YouTube videos made with AI, or are among the 29% of U.S. employees actively sabotaging your company’s use of AI. Perhaps you prefer to not use AI because of environmental or other concerns.

Aside from the monkeywrenching, I’m totally cool with you doing as you choose.

However, I think we start to have real societal problems when people start looking for an AI boogeyman everywhere.

America has a trust crisis. We don’t trust institutions, government, media, public schools, etc.

And thanks to bad actors leveraging AI, we have to question everything in our inbox as well as phone calls from unknown numbers.

If to that growing mistrust we add doubts about whether AI generated the words somebody said to us, I think an already frayed social fabric begins to unravel.

Question the point being made. The logic. Even question the motivation.

But if we go looking for AI behind every corner at the expense of not paying attention to what’s right in front of our faces, well, I don’t know what the outcome’s likely to be.

One thing’s for sure, though: something’s coming, and it ain’t Christmas.