In this week's episode of 'As the AI World Turns,' we see more questionable actions and AI mishaps from Big Tech that could erode trust in generative AI and hinder its adoption.
After disbanding its safety team and seeing key members quit, OpenAI announced a new safety team that includes CEO Sam Altman.
This comes at a time when his “move fast and break things” ethos has been highlighted yet again by former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, who said that the board found out about the November 2023 release of ChatGPT on X and Sam stretched the truth about the “limited” safety measures that had been in place.
Then we see Google pulling back on its generative search after social media lit up with highlights of its hallucinations, including the recommendation to glue cheese to pizza.
Throw in the proliferation of deep fakes, the Scarlett Johansson kerfuffle and fears about job loss and, well, one could see why the average worker and citizen might not think AI is as great as many of us believe.
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While Microsoft is waving around its study showing 75% of workers using Copilot (no info on how often these folks use it), a Reuters study this week shows only 7% of Americans use it regularly.
As longtime tech journalist Christopher Mims pointed out in his WSJ column a few weeks ago and McKinsey has been highlighting in its recent “It’s never just tech” campaign, the pace of new tech adoption, no matter how mind blowing it is, always comes down to human nature.
Our habitual tendencies make uptake much slower than we anticipate.
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OpenAI now providing more functionality in the free version of ChatGPT isn’t coming from the kindness of its heart – it’s an effort to get more people hooked and hopefully upgrade to the paid version.
But first you need to get people to use it at all. People won’t use what they don’t trust.
Some say data is the new currency.
Others say it’s chips.
In reality, it’s trust.
It will take more than one Big Tech player working harder to earn it to convince more people to regularly use what truly can be an incredibly helpful technology.
Let’s get on it.
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