On Using AI to Generate Ideas

bygmee

1.7K followers

8 months ago

Bumped into an interesting article from the Search Engine Journal Newsletter. It discusses the AI thing, and whether to let it do your thinking for you.

Here it is:

Search Engine Journal

Letter From the Editor: Let's not.

Friends, I must tell you I’ve broken one of the cardinal rules of journalism: Don't interview your friends.

It all started when I was lamenting to a stranger the challenge of coming up with new ideas for my weekly letters from the editor. "That sounds like a job for ChatGPT," they said. "Have you ever used ChatGPT for that?"

I was horrified. "Are you asking me, the editor-in-chief of a tech business publication, if I've used ChatGPT to write for me?" I asked. "Absolutely not."

It turns out that I misunderstood. This person wasn't suggesting I have generative AI do my writing for me, but have it come up with ideas. Okay, they weren't recommending plagiarism -- but it gave me pause, nonetheless.

Whose ideas are these, anyway?

Depending on your generative AI tool of choice, the answer could be a shrug. AI chatbots aren’t generating original, first-of-their-kind ideas when prompted for ideas or thought starters. They’re generating outputs based on existing data fed to them or on which it’s been trained – typically without attribution.

So if I were to ask ChatGPT for a list of topics for my letter, the suggestions would have come from somewhere else. The AI itself is not the origin.

I turned to my friend, Barry Ezell, a Lead Software Engineer at Guardian Trust with 23 years of experience in IT.

“Tech has already evolved the way humans function. We’ve become reliant on it,” I whined to him. “Are people going to start relying on Generative AI to do their thinking for them?”

Well. Yes. But also, no. Maybe.

In explaining his answer, Barry alluded to a short story he read in college about a world where humans lived in fully automated apartments and work didn’t exist.

“Everything is a utopia until suddenly, the lights go out, and the machines stop. And people have no idea how to do anything,” he recounted. “And I am concerned that we're heading there quickly. I'm concerned about people even having original thoughts anymore.”

Thankfully, he also had a counter-point: Despite the leaps and bounds made by technology over several decades, Generative AI is, fundamentally, “still storage and retrieval.”

The difference, Barry explained, is that “AI is doing this in a more human way, but it’s still based on previous work – based on previous data, previous input.”

And that doesn’t have to be a bad, doom-and-gloom thing. “I think this can help everybody, including people doing SEO and digital marketing,” he said. “Take the research part of the work. It can be so much faster now, right? That can free up your time to do more creative work.”

It’s an encouraging rebuttal, but not one without caution. First, Generative AI can get it wrong. ChatGPT warns that it “may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts,” while Google says its “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information.” So even when used for benign purposes – if they exist – we can’t trust our handy, friendly, conversational research assistants unequivocally.

In a recent opinion piece, Gary Marcus, co-founder of the Center for the Advancement of Trustworthy AI, pointed to a dangerous trend of conflating generative AI with “general purpose artificial intelligence [AGI, which is] as smart and resourceful as humans.” And while many “would probably like you to believe that AGI is imminent,” he writes, it’s not. Not really. This stuff isn’t sentient (yet).

That also means it can’t come up with ideas for you without, uh, borrowing them from someone else. You’re the one with the human brain, the sentient one. So let’s not:

- Have AI write "original" content for us.
- Rely on AI for ideas.
- Have AI make decisions for us.

But let's make space for our own original thoughts. And yes, there are certain upsetting aspects of our reliance on technology to get stuff done. But there’s an argument to be made that it does free up time for us to be more human – at least by way of being more available, and maybe even more imaginative.

Anthropologically yours,
AZW


Author Spotlight

Amanda is the Editor-in-Chief of SEJ. A writer, editor, marketer, and “Golden Girls” superfan, she joined SEJ from HubSpot, where she ran the company's News & Trends program. Her byline has appeared in Thrillist, EcoSalon, and Fast Company. Find more of her work at amandazw (dot) com.