I used to think that the power requirements might be the downfall of AI. Now I think the lawyers may kill it.
I'm peripherally involved in getting AI approved at our company. It's almost pernicious. Aside from the obvious things, like what are approved or disallowed AI sites for the business, we have to deal with various vendors bundling varying types of AI into their products. The trend seems to be to turn the damn things on by default and then hope we never figure out the legal implications that entails.
We're working on ongoing policy development and locking down some of these things, but it feels like a losing battle, and these vendors aren't making it any easier. Add to that the various flavors of AI have different concerns and vulnerability vectors. Something like ChatGPT might potentially have access to strategic or proprietary information that an employee submits, while something like Claude might be able to infer a business direction from coding requests, or even worse, train the AI to provide a solution that we may have spent months perfecting in-house with the potential to hand it to our competitors with the right prompt.
None of this even considers the unanswered questions about the potential copyright concerns building these models in the first place.
For the supposedly smart people building these things, they sure haven't thought a lot of it through. Or maybe they have and just hope to be so integrated before legal catches up that they can't be removed.
Curious what others are seeing in this area.
Work at a big company. You used to need a special license or permissions, I believe, to have ChatGPT access but now we all have it. I am not a fan, but we are all being encouraged to use it, even creatively. The push to embrace AI reminds me of DEI pushes.
Because we all have it, supposedly it means submitting proprietary info is safe - that’s part of the big sell, I think. (Probably learned people were going rogue querying proprietary info on more public avenues and realized the cat was already out of the bag). Upload data, have AI optimize; AI has knowledge of varying systems and can attack things from a multi-factorial angle more efficiently than people across various functions with varied expertise. Clearly someone with a deep and thorough understanding is needed to ensure results are parsing things and presenting an accurate result, though. AI slop is real.
No insight into legal. All I know is, between my age, offshoring, and AI, I am a bit uneasy about job security.
Related to AI generally, but in robot space, the Prime series Humans was interesting. It gets into legal arguments around protections for conscious humanoid robots. Watching Melania walk side-by-side with that Figure 3 the other week gave me chills.
We're just getting to the point you were at - picking a vendor with a license and locking everything else out. That's just for general. Coding is a whole separate topic we're just starting to wrap our heads around.
I'm up there in age. Could retire in 4 years at 62 assuming I can keep a job that long. Assumed I'd work until my 70s but now it's looking unlikely I'll be able to keep or find any job that long on IT. Plus I've had more than enough of corporate insanity. Maybe I can find a couple of side gigs to keep the lights on ...