I got into this deep discussion the other day with a customer, who said one of his friendly competitors keeps talking about AI, and it had this guy a little flipped out because he isn’t using it for anything. At the end of our discussion we couldn’t really find how AI is going to totally change his business at the moment. He always could use more customers but how does AI bring more customers through his door? Other than using AI to help is social media advertising we couldn’t think of anything else that was a game changer.
It got me thinking should I be using it? So far the only way I have figured it to help me is gathering more info on products I sell but I haven’t tried that experiment yet. Maybe I could use it to help plan my day and make it more efficient? Those really aren’t game changers either.
I love to gamble and have attempted to use AI to develop betting models but it always winds up a disaster. AI always ends up getting confused by screwing up dates and forgetting past results which then requires too much babysitting by me. At that point I spend too much time making sure it’s not giving me bogus information instead of focusing on the original goal, just give me the best educated guess of who’s going to win based on the data I feed it.
My wife has some coworkers who compose emails entirely made up from AI. They have often got burned because they’re too lazy to do thorough proofreading or put it in their own words and have been called out multiple times. One time a coworkers had to send en email out saying an employee no longer worked there. He was fired for insubordination and everyone else knew it and was mad because he was doing some bad things (simplest way I can put it). Of course the email couldn’t say he was fired so AI made the departure sound complimentary and wished the just fired employee best wishes in his future. Other workers were furious that they got an email complementing and well wishing someone who just got fired. All the employee recalled needed was to say “John Doe no longer works here,” instead they AI and the employee screwed it all up because the employee for some reason thought they needed to go beyond just stating a fact.
I still wonder if this is another stupid fad or something that’s really going to bring change down the road. Most analysts think the world is going to look very different possibly as soon as the end of the decade due to AI and how much better our lives will be. Some other analysts legitimately believe it will kill us all one day too.
I mean in 1980 did you think in 2026 people could just shove a needle in their body and lose weight without having to do anything? Did you think most states would have legal marijuana? Those have nothing to do with AI but it just shows how drastically things can change over time.
What has been your experience?
AI is a tool, and can be very manipulative. It reflects what it finds on other servers to make responses, and how the creators have shaped it. The old adage of computer programming still holds: Garbage in, Garage out. It is happening and won't stop. Take a listen to some of the "ALL In" podcasts that cover AI. It really provides a good discussion for it and also the problems.
AI is here to stay. Data response prejudice can potentially be very subtle - that is the scary thing with subjective queries. AI can't process or analyze the way or speed of the human brain.