If you ask anybody what the breakout tech trend of 2023 was, ten out of ten answers will likely come back “AI.” Though we often have to remind folks that AI has been around for a while – everything from spell check to auto-complete on your iPhone – the technology certainly inflected in 2023.
Part of that involves new flavors of AI that haven’t emerged yet to this degree. We’re talking generative and conversational AI, and the proliferation of large language models. They swept the tech and media worlds so quickly that every vertical and niche has been scrambling to figure out how AI applies to them.
This process made 2023 the year of the al-dente test as we like to call it. We’re in a stage of AI’s rise when everyone is throwing it against the wall to see if and how it sticks. Through that process, there are worthwhile discoveries, as well as big misses. This experimental process will continue in 2024.
But what else will define AI’s evolution in 2024? It will advance and transform several industries while disrupting others. And like past tech revolutions (we’ve seen this movie before), the winners will generally be those to lean into it, while the losers shun or underestimate it as a short-term fad.
Ep. 38 Ponders AI’s Al Dente Test and Tech’s Regulatory ‘Welcome’
The Good the Bad & the Ugly
One thing is for sure: AI is here to stay. Unlike past hype cycles (we’re looking at you metaverse), the technology is here and working today… it’s not vapor. So to characterize the success factors we’ve seen so far and predict where AI will fly or die in 2024, here’s our take on the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The Good
Though AI is in beginning stages of experimentation and application, we’ve seen enough evidence of what’s working so far. AI is often successful if it has tangible outcomes for users of a given product or app. Though that sounds obvious, the rule is often not followed, and AI is done instead to check a box.
Examples of “tangible outcomes” include saving users time and addressing pain points that were previously endemic to a given product or process. For example, Adobe has integrated AI throughout its creative cloud, which can streamline creative workflows and save lots of time with generative AI magic.
Similarly, Newfold Digital’s Web.com has integrated AI to help small businesses both devise domain names and construct websites. In all the above examples the name of the game is using AI as a productive tool to streamline some parts of a given workflow, but not necessarily replace user control.
The Bad
AI comes with lots of doom & gloom in the tech press and cable news. There’s ample handwringing over an imminent robot uprising, which of course is overblown. But don’t get us wrong, AI will have negative impacts on society. Some of it will be new and some of it will accelerate bad things already underway.
To expand on the latter, we’ve already seen an erosion in trust in institutions. Misinformation has caused an environment where little can be trusted. That has impacted things like print media, which has been labeled by political extremes as untrustworthy – fairly or unfairly (often the latter but not always).
AI will amplify this and make it so large populations won’t just mistrust what they read but also what they see and hear. Put another way, generative AI like deepfakes or voice impersonation could do for video, audio, or evidence-based content what misinformation has erstwhile done to print and digital sources.
The Ugly
Building on AI’s potential to bring new dimensions to misinformation, it will culminate in the upcoming election cycle. Fake video, audio, and imagery will clog social news feeds and other online sources, to the point where trust is eroded. And in that trust vacuum, confirmation bias will thrive.
To color these concepts with a hypothetical, we could see consequential political figures caught doing bad things (think: Georgia phone call or “shooting someone on 5th avenue”). The new defense will be that whatever hot mic or grainy video captured the act is AI-generated. Ardent followers will believe it.
Let’s hope it doesn’t go that far, but this will be the thing to watch. AI won’t bring us SkyNet, but it could certainly do things that are damaging in other ways. And that will have to be where reform and regulation focus. Either way, AI will be the impactful (good and bad) tech to watch in ’24. We’ll stay on top of it.
