Author: IRPA AI Analyst, Chris Surdak
Google once again finds itself the target of the Internet’s attention, like the Eye of Sauron looking for its ring. Google had advertised their AI product Gemini, stating that the platform was ideal for helping small businesses grow. Unfortunately, the Internet is both deeply unforgiving and never forgets. So, when users found elements of the commercial to feel familiar they rapidly got to work and, unfortunately, were quick to find something fishy.
It turns out, the narrative about cheese that the commercial claimed was auto-generated by Gemini AI on demand actually appeared word-for-word directly on another website back in 2020. It is unclear if this was simply a bait and switch, or if Gemini regurgitated a piece of content with which it was trained, but nonetheless a firestorm of criticism about the finding hit social media, mere hours after the incident took place.
While the reuse, regurgitation, or substitution of old content presented as new is itself not significant news, this is once again telling evidence that using AI in unsupervised applications or use cases may be a recipe for substantial conflict. In one can never be sure exactly what or how a GenerativeAI platform will respond to a question how can you ever trust it? And, if you can never fully trust it won’t you necessarily have to monitor it to make sure it doesn’t run afoul of acceptable behaviors and responses. And, if you have to constantly monitor its actions, are you really gaining any benefit from its use, or might you simply be better off searching for answers yourself, the old Internet 1.0 and 2.0 way?
This most recent example of GenerativeAI Whoopies reinforces the guidance we have been giving for several years: success with AI is deeply use-case-dependent. Make sure that the value you hope to derive through adopting AI is worth the added cost and risk that comes with its use. If not, you too might have your Super Bowl moment, and not the fun, getting-a-big-ring moment, either.
About the Author:
Chris Surdak is a Senior IRPA AI Advisor and was formerly White House Chief Transformation officer, Automation & AI Practice Lead at EY & Executive Partner for Digital Transformation at Gartner. He’s an engineer, futurist, transformation executive and best-selling author, with over 30 years’ experience in technology development and deployment, digital transformation, blockchain, data and analytics and AI & intelligent automation
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Originally posted in the IRPA AI Network — Enterprise AI