Since we all know I lean toward cautious Luddism, let’s begin with a disclaimer. I recognize some positive uses for artificial intelligence (A.I.) programs to return information for businesspeople seeking ways to automate their repetitive tasks.
With that out of the way, let’s get on with my horror at the idea we’re allowing our brains to atrophy in favor of a $20/month program that can do our thinking for us. I’ll go a step further and suggest we’re giving up the creative and fun side of entrepreneurship because an A.I. can return answers really fast—and that’s super cool to the Silicon Valley bros who play with it at 3 a.m.
Of course, I’m being snarky. Like I said above, there will be instances where getting that answer from a machine in the back office can be a lifesaver. For example, during the National Pavement Expo (NPE) in Tampa, Jan. 24, Ari Bleemer of ONECREW led a morning huddle titled “A.I. in the Paving Industry” where the audience discussed solving problems in the back office. One member of the audience quoted a co-worker’s wise saying to “automate the grind, free the mind.” That’s a brilliant way to approach the use of databases that analyze patterns, predict results and offer answers for the paving contractor. It makes perfect sense to gather your data, feed it to a system that can interpret it “smartly,” and help you use it more efficiently for estimating, bidding, reporting, re-ordering materials or what have you.
What worried me that morning was the discussion veering into the realm of creativity and marketing, wherein audience members and the leader suggested allowing an A.I. to generate copy, text and headlines for communicating messages to the world. The consensus was it’s better to have an A.I. create low-quality language for us humans to tweak than to pay a professional copywriter or public relations professional who studied marketing to create campaigns for the contractor. Try that before your next town hall where the neighbors are up in arms about odors coming from your asphalt plant. Go ahead. I’ll wait for the result.
What we humans need to recognize is there are tech bros like Benji Smith among us who don’t quite grasp the sensitivity behind creativity. Smith is the creator of Prosecraft and a problematic company called Shaxpir, for which he (allegedly) illegally uploaded 25,000 published manuscripts from the web into his database. Without getting too deep in the weeds here, I’ll explain he promised a way to evaluate authors’ books for number of adverbs, tone of voice, passive versus active voice, and so on with this database. When some big-name authors noticed their titles were in this database, being used without their permission, the question of piracy came up (among other problems).
And that’s how I view most of the A.I. platforms available to the public. It does not please me that we’re normalizing the pirating of creative work—whether that’s been happening for years in other ways—in the name of making current-day systems more efficient or cheaper for big companies. I don’t consider it “fair” when someone takes my work and makes money from it without my permission.
Now, it does please me to see leaders like Bleemer promoting the concept of individual companies putting their own data into their own databases to create their own models and questions to return their own results. That? That’s responsible and legal innovation and I’m excited to see where that can take a contractor in the future. I’m excited to see how that can help contractors build better estimates, win more lucrative bids and create more substantive employee assistance programs. I’m excited to see them manipulating A.I. morally.