In the last few days the Instagram algorithm thought I should receive a deluge of marketing prophets and promises of incredible results.
Starting with the man who introduces himself as the “most interesting person in the room”, to the lady who says she is going to give a free class to “teach you how to charge more for your medical appointments”, to another lady who says she started to make better use of her time when she gave A.I. the task of recording the videos for her, or the 5 people between 20 and 30 years old – one of them holding a glass of wine, another in a very luxurious room – who will teach me everything about how to get out of health plans and earn more with my private practice .. I assume they will also offer me the medical school diploma.
We talk about A.I. as if it was something revolutionary that was recently developed. We can travel back in time to 1943, the year in which Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts developed the first computational model for neural networks. Neither McCulloch nor Pitts, nor even Alan Turing, who in 1950 proposed the “Turing Test” to evaluate the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to or indistinguishable from a human being, coined the term A.I..
Only in 1956, John McCarthy, who used the expression during a conference at Dartmouth College, established the beginning of the use of this term.
In 2021, I was talking to an university colleague from my engineering times, who works in this area, who told me that the A.I. trend made him laugh, when technological solutions of this type had been developed for decades, without putting such label on it.
Let’s come back to October 2024.
In case any idea has arisen that the text has some kind of anti-A.I. content, we can settle any type of doubt: like any type of technological solution, as long as its role is to help society, I will always be in favor of its existence and use .
But, let’s look at some points about the use of A.I.:
Copyright and intellectual property
How many people make money off of something they didn’t create and didn’t do any work other than asking an A.I. platform. to create? And where do those who created the foundations for the final product come in? (A question valid for social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram, where the same video circulates on hundreds or thousands of accounts, generating views, clicks, revenue for many people, but not for those who created them, without any type of financial compensation for the original creators).
Creativity
If we use technology to create, where did the creative process go? The creative process becomes binary, a set of 1s and 0s, without much intervention beyond “do this” or “create that”. Of course, we, people, humans, create based on everything we absorb, on our experiences, but, if the machine does that, where is our desire to seek more experiences, more ideas to feed our creative spirit?
Knowledge
Let’s consider the learning pyramid, created by American psychiatrist William Glasser. Glasser argued that just memorizing is not enough, after all, concepts are easily forgotten after class. He argued that the most effective way to learn is by doing.
According to Glasser’s theory, we learn by:
Reading – 10%;
Listening (audiovisual) – 20%;
Observing (demonstration) – 30%;
Seeing and Listening – 50%;
Discussing/Debating – 70%;
Doing – 80%;
Teaching – 95%.
Do we agree that, if we hand over the creation process – Doing – to technology, we abdicate one of the most effective ways of learning, knowing, acquiring and retaining knowledge?
We can go further and ask if, when handing over this creation process to A.I., will we exclude the option immediately below, discuss/debate? If the A.I. says it is so, so it must be.
Mentors and experts
Look at the proliferation of mentors and experts. When I was invited to be a mentor, 3 years ago, I received an invitation, went through an interview phase and then wA.I.ted to find out if I matched the profile they wanted.
What has been (very) frequent is the popping up of instant mentors and experts. They take a course, after finishing the course they are already mentors and experts. Does it work? I seriously doubt it. Especially when we look at people who join these courses because they weren’t getting results. Before even putting it into practice, they added water and the final product was achieved: instant mentors and experts.
A.I. is a dangerous resource for mentors and experts without knowledge and experience. They assume that the result delivered by A.I. is true, without having knowledge to check it is right or wrong. Big mistake.
Providing elements to power A.I. platforms. with image and voice is questionable. Deep fakes do not appear out of thin A.I.r. Most A.I. platforms that are on the market are awful. They do not have the minimum quality, for example, when creating subtitles, not only because they have an exaggerated number of spelling and grammatical errors, but also because they do not respect the logic of subtitles (subtitles are written text, they are not oral text), which easily allows us to deduce that in terms of platform security, quality should also be reduced, after all “done is better than perfect”. The desired MVP becomes a final product, skipping MMP, MLP, MDP and MAP.
If we don’t go to a restaurant where the food is of low quality or the hygiene is poor, if we don’t go to a carpenter to take care of our teeth, if we complA.I.n when there’s a measly BUG on Instagram, why would we use A.I. solutions that do not meet all the requirements?
A.I. it must be used when it is finished, even though it is always possible to improve or upgrade it, and it must be used for processes in which human beings would only waste time.
Reviewing content is not a waste of time, it is a guarantee that we deliver the best product or service. Creating is not a waste of time. Learning is not a waste of time.
Throwing A.I. processes that make us improve and make us create with more quality, is taking from humans something that should be developed and nourished.
