Artificial intelligence (AI) has been all over the news for the last couple years. The advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini AI systems have been met with everything from curiosity to anticipation to fear.
The possibilities for a future with everything from science fiction AI’s controlling the fate of humans to a world where mundane tasks are handled by computers while humans pursue leisure activities entice the imagination. For businesses, less attention to mundane tasks and more to higher level activities is attractive. AI is no longer a futuristic concept, it’s already here.
What is AI?
“AI is developing intelligent machines capable of simulating human intelligence such as learning, problem solving, decision making—taking the human brain and putting it on steroids,” said Darcy Neighbors, founder/CEO, CIM Marketing Partners. “It’s cool but it’s scary at the same time, because of the unknowns.”
Artificial intelligence is technology that learns and adapts and mimics human behavior. “The term actually dates back to the 1950s and an early example of AI was a computer that could play checkers. [It] could learn to play checkers and get better at playing checkers,” said Patrick Reilly, attorney and shareholder at Brownstein. A few decades later IBM computer Deep Blue played the then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov and beat him in 1997. “That’s how it developed, how it does develop,” Reilly said. “In today’s world, when you’re composing a text message and your smartphone suggests the next word, that’s a form of artificial intelligence.”
That particular type of AI is apt to be either helpful or annoying, depending on how well presumptive text guesses the message. What’s generating more buzz is a subset of AI, generative AI. “That’s artificial intelligence that creates content and doesn’t merely compute or predict or adapt,” said Reilly. “Generative AI takes a gigantic database of information—think of a really large encyclopedia—then you use the database, you put in the parameters, and it creates content for you.”
Except the database is the internet, which is full of things already created by humans and often proprietary, trademarked and copyrighted. AI isn’t creating. It’s searching the internet and putting together things that humans created.
That’s how the system draws information, “Through a big scrape of the internet and so much of it is amalgamated and the final product is based on variations [of existing content],” said Alan Yang, assistant professor, Information Systems, UNR. “Now whether or not you can create something new, that’s a matter of debate. Someone argued that if this combination of words has not been seen before, then it constitutes something that’s new.”
So, isn’t AI taking content from where it finds it a just a variation on a student writing a book report from Google?
“Correct,” said Reilly. “There’s a recent lawsuit from the New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI where they were saying look, you took millions of articles from the New York Times and dumped them into your database and you’re using that content that you didn’t pay for and you’re not giving us credit for, to generate AI content. You’re required to pay us for it.” New York Times and seven other newspapers are suing OpenAI.
“What’s been making waves, especially in the past year, is generative AI, heralded by ChatGPT and OpenAI,” said Yang. “It enabled immediate processing of input and generation of output that really mimics what a human maybe could do: write essays or do coding or templating, user-enabled at a much faster way that has never been seen before prior to the introduction of [ChatGPT] in 2022.”
What AI Can Do
But if AI is already here, filling in bits of text messages, asking questions of visitors to websites, presupposing human needs, what are Nevada business owners doing with it?
Basically, they’re using it for anything that promotes efficiency or helps the bottom line. A Wall Street Journal article indicated some 97 percent of CEOs were planning on investing millions of dollars into AI over the next five years.
AI is being used in finance, in customer service and in healthcare where it can prioritize patient care based on imaging scans which it reads faster and more accurately than humans can. In Nevada AI is used to enhance the casino experience. AI is data mining and producing real time analytics, as well as being used for cheat detection.
“There’s a term called player sentiment analysis in online gaming. What AI does is try to understand player’s preferences for different aspects of the game, such as story or graphics or game player,” said Reilly. “That’s a little above my pay grade. I’m not a gaming attorney. But it’s not just online, and I would imagine that will work its way into slot machines.”
“The number one thing businesses think about is how to increase efficiency, and obviously that goes to the bottom line in terms of return on investment,” said Benes Aldana, president, National Judicial College. “But the other pros of using AI are improved decision making, enhanced customer experiences, ability to analyze vast amounts of data, to use for actionable insights where essentially now that data can be compressed and summarized and provide recommendations so decision makers can make decisions, in a faster way.”
“In the marketing business we’re using it extensively in marketing automation. That’s just automating any repetitive task such as email, social media management, ad campaign optimization, marketing optimization, ” said Neighbors. “[AI] allows us, as marketers, to free up our time with more automated tasks to be focused more on strategic initiatives of clients and what we need to do to grow their companies.”
Yang believes current use by businesses probably involves creating templates, filling out forms, reading documents – mundane uses. For example, real estate listings have been a time consuming process requiring filling out information by hand. An AI template provides relevant information and some kind of file and can fill in all the additional information for the user.
University of Nevada, Reno’s (UNR) advisement office is looking to utilize customized AI assistance to help students schedule the right classes. What would take a human a chunk of time AI can do many times faster in dealing with requirements for majors and minors.
What it Shouldn’t Do
Where AI is being used extensively by many industries is in content creation. Anyone can use a chatbot to generate answers to questions, though again, that content runs the risk of being plagiarized from other material. It’s also the magic behind websites that lead users through Q&A to determine what they need from a company or service or where their query should be directed.
Some of the cons where AI is concerned have been highlighted in media, like potential job displacement. There’s also a need for transparency, said Aldana, as it relates to ethical concerns related to bias and fairness. “There’s a continuing need for substantial investment in AI infrastructure and expertise,” he said.
AI is evolving. In the legal profession, there’s a need for professionals including judges to understand the implications of AI and not just the technology, but issues like privacy, ethics, compliance, so that lawyers can effectively advise and represent clients. Keeping pace with technology is challenging but, Aldana believes, achievable through ongoing education.
For judges it’s important, not only from the court management efficiency perspective, but for legal issues that come before the court involving AI. Some courts have used it to generate pre-sentencing reports particularly in criminal cases.
New technology often brings with it the fear that human jobs will be lost to automation. AI with its ability to learn and then do what people do only much, much faster, definitely raises that fear.
“I think it will change jobs more than anything else,” said Reilly. When Excel was introduced in 1982, it sounded the death knell for accountants. In reality it just freed accountants from mundane tasks and allowed them to focus on other things. “AI will change a lot of our jobs. There will be some losses, there will be some gains, but it will really just take a lot of the functions and change them for businesses and for workers.”
It seems like for AI to take over industries and functions completely it would have to have more human elements to it, if for no other reason than it’s interacting with and producing content for humans.
“AI is great, but we’ve got to have the human in the middle,” said Neighbors. “If the human’s not in the middle, then we lose credibility, we lose the ability to think through situations.” Chat by itself is still very robotic. Humans aren’t unnecessary for content creation.
Bots and Business—Staying Safe
So how do business owners guard against AI and what exactly are they guarding against?
“First and foremost, become educated on what the capabilities are and the pros and cons, then put into place, even in company manuals, what is allowed and what isn’t allowed,” said Neighbors.
AI is interacting with humans. ChatGPT has been entertaining, alarming or assisting humans since it was released November 30, 2022. Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) is software that combines language with AI to create a humanlike conversation. Meant to be used for content creation, it understands language and can search a database and create content in seconds.
Still, there’s the problem of duplicate content, or plagiarism. Google penalizes companies for having duplicate content on their sites. No matter what it seems like, AI isn’t creating content. It’s creating an amalgamation of human work.
“You’re basically training it. You’re putting in content that the artificial intelligence is trying to make sense of, and a lot of times the content it spits back out can be very similar, sometimes almost identical to content someone else is putting in,” said Neighbors. “Add that to your website and you’ve got duplicate content. There’s just so much unknown as far as how Google and some of the big companies are going to deal with this going forward. I think there are going to be a lot of legal ramifications down the road. I don’t know what those are today, but I think as a company you’ve always got to be looking at how that might be a crisis to your company.”
There’s also the problem of content that doesn’t actually exist. “There’s some wide media attention to a case involving misuse by lawyers who have submitted briefs containing fictitious citations generated by ChatGPT,” said Aldana. “In those instances the court found them essentially guilty of making false and misleading statements due to their failure to verify AI-generated information properly.”
Such misuse is leading courts and bar associations to scrutinize AI use in the legal industry and develop regulatory recommendations. A number of task forces around the country have been created to address the benefits and dangers of AI.
“Implications are multifaceted and with the growing technology, the legal side, the business side, are getting caught up. The biggest focus for AI existence businesses are focusing on is the need for it to be transparent and explainable. Businesses need to stay updated on legal developments to ensure compliance and to avoid any kind of legal disputes,” said Aldana.
This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
AI exists, which means bad actors are taking advantage of it. Deepfakes are any kind of audio or visual data manipulated to represent something that isn’t based in reality. Typically this means something like superimposing a face onto an image or utilizing audio that’s synthesized, produced by AI, to provide something that’s not real. Celebrities have been deep faked, like the audio of Emma Watson reading Mein Kampf or Morgan Freeman telling everyone not to believe in reality (the deepfake may have had a point). A deepfake of President Biden advised New Hampshire voters not to go to the polls in their January primary.
“There’s still a lot of artifacting which is blemishes in the superimposition of fakes onto an image or audio file versus something that is legitimate or from a singular source,” said Yang. There are consumer tools on the market that allow anyone to alter images and audio files. “But then you have more advanced technology starting to develop and help to superimpose faces onto video or track audio in real time. At the moment these are quite good but they’re only getting better.”
AI has the capability of both detection and intrusion—it can protect or threaten a business. Phishing attacks are currently generated by humans. But bad actors with entrepreneurial spirits might study what attacks work and build an AI template with a better chance of success, Yang suggested.
Businesses can also identify where leaks are happening in a system and potentially use AI to patch those holes. “But it really depends on where the application is being utilized,” said Yang. “It’s a tool, not a catchall for any of an organization’s problems. I would say legitimate cyber security concerns are still there. They can be affected by AI, but at the moment there doesn’t seem to be a wave of AI attacks occurring. But an entrepreneurial attacker could definitely utilize AI technology to make an attack unfortunately more effective.”
AI is just getting going, and there are pros and cons for businesses using its capabilities. According to Aldana, data shows adoption of AI is still slow in some sectors, even in the business world. In the legal world it’s primarily seen as a research tool.
“AI is an evolving landscape. It’s important folks don’t put their heads in the sand, but rather embrace it and figure out how to use it in a way that’s going to be efficient for whatever business that you have,” said Aldana.
“There are some efficiencies with [using AI],” said Neighbors. “I’ll go into Gemini, the Google ChatGPT, and throw in something to get an idea and I’m blown away by what it spits back out. This is pretty good. Granted it doesn’t have a lot of strategy and emotion behind it, but you can add that 20 or 25 percent. Talk about streamlining the process—it’s crazy.”
“The pros are that, right now, it’s the wild west, and the cons are that right now it’s the wild west,” said Reilly. “You don’t have any rules, expectations, norms. Those haven’t been set yet. So there’s a lot of opportunity and a lot of risk. That’s why it’s kind of scary. Because it’s a brave new world, but we don’t know exactly how to use this in a society. There are ethical issues, moral issue and legal issues, all tied up together.”
