Buckle Up, The AI Genie Is Out of The Bottle
I’ve had many conversations about ChatGPT from people that aren’t on what I call “The LinkedIn Grid" lately.
My mom is one of those people for example. She’s not reading Substacks and having an online discourse about how AI is changing her world. But she wants to know if ChatGPT would be valuable to her as a new retiree (Yes). I’ve had other conversations with friends in industries that aren’t mine that have asked me, “Do I need to know code?” (No).
The last few years of tech innovations, like crypto, web3, the metaverse and NFTs, had big barriers to entry. They were a bit daunting and the learning curves were steep. Also, one by one, each of these trends have experienced some sort of crash or fizzle.
Considering most of these hype bubbles of the recent past have burst, it’s not surprising that many people are currently making assumptions that AI is simply for tech bros in Silicon Valley or for young, internet-native whippersnappers who want to cheat on an English midterm paper.
It doesn't help that the media headlines are similar to ones we’ve seen from 2018-2022: “It Will Change Everything!” “It’s Going to Disrupt Industries!” “The New Gold Rush is Here” – How many times have we heard this?
It’s like ever since the mass adoption of social media took the world by surprise no one wants to miss the next big thing. And the social discourse phase that comes after “This is it! The thing is here!” is usually “If you’re not learning how to use this you will get left behind!”
We are here.
This is why my mom and friends off the LinkedIn grid are starting to ask me about it. Inside of their curiosity and skepticism is, “Will I get left behind if I don’t know how to use AI tools?”
They want to assess it and pigeonhole it, like we all do to survive and compartmentalize news and information. Author Elizabeth Gilbert has said, “Pigeonholeing is something people need to do in order to feel like they have set the chaos of existence into some kind of reassuring order.” And honestly, it’s a fair place to be with Silicon Valley creations at this moment. If it’s not their beloved bank collapsing, it’s the effect of social media and cell phones on a generation of teenagers. Or the former richest person in the world buying Twitter and losing their damn mind. Or meme-stocks crashing the market. Silicon Valley = Volatility.
But it’s in the space of volatility that creative things are made and innovation happens. And innovation is happening, my friends.
I believe that chatbots, like ChatGPT and Bard, are in fact the beginning of “The Next Big Thing.”
It’s not a blind, overly-optimistic prediction, IMHO. This opinion is coming from the perspective of a person who was on the ground floor of the last “Big Thing” in tech that fundamentally changed our society, and I’m seeing very similar patterns emerge.
I watched mainstream social media adoption happen in real time as a recent grad from the University of Texas in 2009. I was meant to be an urban planner, but hiring freezes due to the recession of that era had other plans.
During my undergraduate years I had been using social media to galvanize students as a leader of The Urban Development Society and of a subsequent grassroots organization, called Rail4Real.
It was easy to use social media to disseminate information, to foster conversation, and to organize students on a mass scale. Our Facebook community was personalized to students, useful to the overarching cause, and helped us to grow. It also made our organization appear more “official”, giving us the status we needed to show up at city council meetings, to hold events in public places within the city with a panel of speakers, and to coordinate field trips to construction sites to meet developers.
It wasn’t long before I made a career pivot in the post-recession world. In 2010, while working at a bakery (with health insurance! – it's one of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had), and after acquiring a grant to use social media to listen to conversations about Austin transportation via Twitter (that’s another story), I got an internship at an advertising agency as a recent undergraduate.
They laughed at my boldness to waltz into a big advertising firm with an urban studies + architecture degree and apply for the account planner internship (I had to Google what it was before I applied), but they respected my larger vision: I wanted to work at an ad firm because I believed social media would be a big part of advertising and I wanted to know how advertising “worked.”
They said, “Here’s the deal: We like your spirit and your energy. No one has applied for the HR internship. If you can help us with payroll and assist our office manager, we’ll set up exploratory meetings for you with a creative director, a copywriter, and an account exec; and we’ll also let you participate in the internship project with the creative and account interns.” DEAL.
Why was I making this bet? Why was I taking on a third job? I could see the value in social media.
And frankly, all I had in my fridge was day-old bread from the bakery, my Brita water filter, and a single Lone Star beer. I also learned the hard way that grant money doesn’t come in cute every-two-week paychecks.
Nevermind that the ad firm thought I was a wide-eyed young optimist about social media – and well, I was. They had desktop computers that they left at work every day. Very few people had iPhones. It was the early days, and the technological acceleration of laptops, iPads, and mobile technology was on the horizon – but not there yet. I could still see the potential. I experienced it in a very visceral way at UT. I had personally benefited from social media.
The potential* I saw with social media in the 2010s is very similar to the potential I see with the recent rise of AI chatbots.
*I’m leaving out the negative potential today, but there are plenty of similar, anxiety-inducing negative omens when you compare the advent of AI to social media.
It’s easy to use - Using AI chatbots is as simple as typing into a text box to get the answers you need. It may be even more simple than posting a social media update: you merely open your browser, go to the site, sign up with your email address, and open the tool.
It’s widely useful across many disciplines - AI and social media can be used by anyone for a diverse array of mainstream purposes. With social media you can organize a grassroots movement or discuss the most recent episode of Succession (OMG, Connor’s Wedding am I right?!). With AI you can have help drafting an email, composing a script for negotiating a raise, or finding new recipes with the ingredients you have in your house (Hello, mom! You’re gonna love this).
It’s personable - Both social media and AI chatbots are tools that help bolster your own personal creativity. They’re platforms for your thoughts, ideas and questions about work, life and culture.
It can enhance your status - When you look smarter, write more clearly, or have assistance from a filter or a language bot, your perceived and/or real status could increase among your personal relationships and peer groups.
When you compare these qualities to recent tech trends, you can see that while each trend could have mass utility, it would first require mainstream adoption.
If you don’t have “ease” and “widely useful” as a slam dunk, it’s harder for these trends to gain traction and to truly change the world in a dynamic way.
I want to make clear that the story isn’t over for each of these tech trends. The stories of NFTs, crypto, etc. are unique and have their own adoption curves associated. Heck, we’ve been saying AI will be the next big thing since the 80s, even though things were a little vague back then. It initially failed the “ease” and “widely useful” clearances for sure.
What’s clear now is that AI is now tangible and widely accessible. If you know how to use Google search and have an email address, then you’re able and ready to use ChatGPT.
I’ve emphatically encouraged everyone I’ve had this conversation with to try it, going so far as opening it on my phone and letting people prompt it in real time.
It’s not that you’re going to get left behind if you don’t, oh no. Legacy brands are building these capabilities into the tools and apps we already use daily. Newer companies are going to knock our socks off with things we cannot even envision from their engineering teams.
Chatbots and image generators are what’s happening now, but soon it will be a lot more than “prompting”. We may not even know that we’re using AI when we’re using it. The day is already here for assistance with creating a Powerpoint deck and Notion cleaning up an erratic grocery list.
So, why not jump in? It’s easy, useful and it can help your life now. Why wait?
Grade school teachers are embracing this moment and adapting to this new world with their students. Culinary personalities are trying out ways to create personalized recipes. You can even have an AI companion if you so wish.
Also, right now we’re playing in a safer creative sandbox than what could potentially come in the future with AI, which is essentially unknown. There are already calls for slowing the progression of the technology beyond ChatGPT-4, and it’s certainly a moment to be pragmatic about where this is all going. A lot of surprises are ahead of us that we cannot even predict or envision for culture and society. Some of them aren’t so rosy if we get too ahead of ourselves.
But one thing’s for sure: The genie is out of the bottle and AI’s here to grant us more than three wishes. It’s worth noodling around in the sandbox of AI platforms for a while.
