Artifice and Artificial are not the Terms for This

Last week we had a great conversation with an entrepreneur leveraging ChatGPT, a generative AI program to generate a very useful application for domain searching. Augmenting the Machine: AI and the Future of Work — The Great Conversation (the-great-conversation.com)

This week a good friend and past colleague, Karen Gifford, provided me a link to a blog written by Bill Carmody, Chief Coaching Officer for Positive Intelligence. Embedded within the article was a post written by his new digital assistant in his voice with a graphical header also developed by a version of the program….both in under 8 minutes. (2) 2023: ChatGPT Enters the Coaching Industry (And Many Others) | LinkedIn

Here is a quote from the article:

“The beauty of ChatGPT will be the balance of creativity, ingenuity, and your own life experience. It's a tool just like Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. What's different, is this is an easily accessible tool that anyone can use -- without knowing anything about artificial intelligence or computer code.”

A CSO once said to me: “Why are people in our industry afraid of technology like the cloud, artificial intelligence, and robotics?” He and I discussed walking into our homes. We do not fund or control the electrical infrastructure. but we leverage it for a monthly fee. We do not purchase or control the natural gas infrastructure, but we leverage it to heat our homes for a monthly fee. And there are many other instances of leveraging technology and business models to create similar enhancements to our lives.

Carmody suggests he doesn’t need to create, fund, or understand AI to leverage this AI program to accelerate and activate his ideas and experience. And he sees the dilution of value that might occur to “coaches” who are not leveraging the technology in the future.

The world changes. We adapt. Enhancing our productivity. Our resilience. And our search for value. Humans created this. Humans leverage this.

Yes, there are saboteurs among us. And our tools can take on human artifice. Perhaps calling this artificial is part of the problem.