Despite the cooking related title, this post is about the big AI buzz. I really think that a lot of AI adversarial comments are not balanced in the way that they do not offer real solutions, just a KISS state of mind. Which is fine for most situations, but make no mistake: AI is here to stay and we all should learn to use it for our benefit and be mindful of environmental impacts, as well as potential intellectual property harming, lack of appropriate attribution rights or just committing plain plagiarism. What do I mean by this?
Using AI the right way is hard!
Let’s take this text I’m writing, for the sake of example. I could ask for AI to write a really cool blog post for me to copy and paste into the editor and just hit publish. Heck! I could even ask for an AI generated picture to go with it. Something in the line of a robot serving sloppy food to mindless humans. To be honest, this sentence sounds so cool in my imagination I doubt any generative AI could do it justice. But hey, if I did this, I wouldn’t have fun writing it and you’d be reading someone else’s words. I’m not a native english speaker but the only help I want for my writing is the spell checker, right?
Another example, other than possible plagiarism to another writer’s work, is computer code. When I use AI to generate programs, it got the content from somewhere. The robots are still not truly intelligent, so it must have nicked it from some github repository. If I use it, without proper attribution, am I a bad guy? I can say it’s the robot’s fault, I don’t really even care how it landed on my code editor.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say most people are disconnected from the true AI state of the art and they think it’s actually capable of thinking like a human. That it’s actually capable of producing original work like a live person. It’s not, ok? And also it’s not ok!
Like I said, using AI the right way is hard. It starts by learning what it is, how it works, what it can achieve (or not) and the costs of using it.
The key is accountability. If we are going to leverage the immense power of AI, we must take ownership of the output, ensuring it aligns with ethical standards, respects intellectual property, and serves as a tool for augmentation, not outright replacement. The conversation shouldn’t be about banning the soup before tasting it; it should be about learning to cook with a new, powerful ingredient responsibly. Only then can we move past the adversarial mindset and harness this technology in a way that benefits creators and society alike.
