AI: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

We have all had uneven experiences with artificial intelligence, and I have to remind myself frequently that it is a technology that is still in Beta; there are a few home runs, a few base hits, and a lot of strikeouts. (I don’t know much about baseball, so true fans need to give me some leeway in case I strike out with this analogy.)

The Good

In my personal winners/losers list, Apple stands out as the home run king. (I’m going to ride that baseball analogy into the ground.) Their telephone system and their online setup both reflect a commitment to make AI as “I” as possible. I have both called them and visited their website, and rather than offering me a bunch of choices that have no relation to why I’ve contacted them, they understand plain-English speech or text nearly flawlessly, and deliver efficiently the answers I want.

Number two on my list may surprise you, because QuickBooks is the app everybody loves to hate. They have become the standard of business bookkeeping, but that’s not because they’re that good; everybody else is just so bad. They change their online version whenever they damn well please, without notification, and never seem to make it any better—just more confusing. But their AI chat engine is pretty good. Online you can conduct a voice session with their AI bot, and there are times when you feel like you’re having an actual conversation with an actual sentient being. (Let me rephrase that, because I don’t want to offend AI bots, or they may come looking for me: “actual human being.”)

Unfortunately, the QuickBooks bot can only tell you about features the application has, and anyone who uses QuickBooks knows that the people who develop the program must be on meth, because it lacks features that other programs take for granted. Unfortunately, the AI bot can do nothing about this, except to report that what you want to do is impossible. (I thought I detected a note of regret in the voice of the bot; the experience reminded me a little bit of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey: “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”)

The Bad

And that pretty much completes the list of effective uses of artificial intelligence in business. Every other company that I’ve dealt with uses a crippled AI engine that does nothing more than repeat my requests and/or presents me with a list of choices that have nothing to do with my request.

The Good Again

But I have discovered some wonderful things about the AI engines that are accessible to sentient humans—ChatGPT, CoPilot, Gemini, and so on. (I am at war with China, so I refuse to use DeepThink, although, in fairness, it is rumored to be pretty good.)

I was talking to my techie friend Malachi recently and I asked him if he used AI to help him with computer coding. He said he did, but in a limited way. That got me to thinking about how I could use it to program Word macros and Excel formulas. It took me a while to refine my prompts, but I was able to have ChatGPT and CoPilot generate a macro and a formula, each of which was complex enough to warrant 50 lines of code or more. After a little trial and error, I was able to convince the bot to generate code that was flawless—something that would have taken me hours upon hours, learning Visual Basic and advanced mathematics. No thanks, I have too many hobbies as it is.

The Ugly?

I was talking to another gifted coder friend about this who didn’t like the fact that artificial intelligence allowed mere civilians to generate code as good as someone with a lot more education and experience – in other words, geeks.

I feel his pain. But, as he himself has reminded me in other conversations, you can’t stop progress from progressing. All through history, there are stories of disruptions and dislocations occasioned by the advent of new ways of doing things: gunpowder, the horse, horse-drawn carriages, the printing press, the steam engine, the gasoline engine, electricity, the telegraph, faxes, cell phones, trains, planes, automobiles, computers, the Internet, social media, cloud computing, movies, radio, television—each of these innovations resulted in job losses, new jobs, and the decline or disappearance of the technology it succeeded. (My heart goes out to buggy-whip manufacturers and workers.)

Any sentient being—make that “human being”—feels the pain of progress. But it’s going to happen, regardless of how you feel. Buck up, bucko: in any era, success belongs to those who recognize and capitalize on whatever is next. It’s your choice.