Let me begin by saying that I love technology and broadly speaking it continues to enhance our lives and the world around us. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will continue to be refined to the point that they augment many parts of how we live and work, and that will predominantly be for the better.
But we’re just not there yet.
With so many of the worlds major technical breakthroughs the fat majority of the work is done without much public attention. In part because they’re difficult to properly understand and because the broad appeal isn’t yet identified. Machine learning continues to not be a common or popular concept, despite that being a large part of the current AI craze. The most the public really saw of pattern matching and image recognition was a security captcha.
With AI, as it is currently understood by the broader public, the work is being done in the open. Text-based chat is something many of us are familiar with, even when its a machine on the other end. By surfacing the latest AI research through this medium it immediately becomes accessible and therefore grows in popularity.
I believe AI will become a key component of many underlying technologies that we rely on.
But we’re just not there yet.
Today’s AI is the technical equivalent of added sugar. It is being added - typically as a cloned chat bot - to every app and service. Companies are rushing to replace their human support chat with an AI-powered one. Marketing teams are tweaking the output thrown back by Claude and ChatGPT and generating so much fluff that we can’t move for content (don’t you hate how generic a term that is?)
I genuinely believe in a few years we’ll see a desire for AI-free apps. Organic articles, written by a fellow human, edited by another. AI - like added sugar - produces something quick, exciting, different. But as it is today it’s hardly wholesome.
These services do serve a purpose though, and as much of a risk as it feels to be evolving this technology under such an intense spotlight, it does make it so much easier for entrepreneurs to find what comes next. I personally use Claude most days for research and editing, two tasks that I find it excels at.
I think the current availability of these tools, primarily chat bots, are best utilised behind the scenes. Use them to help augment and refine your work, but don’t put them front and centre. No one wants to read a 1,000-word article produced by AI for no other purpose than SEO. And certainly no one wants to read a LinkedIn thought leadership post written by Claude.
AI is hugely exciting and will enrich technology in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
But we’re just not there yet.