It's Time to Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way
Learn The
Art of the Artificial Intelligence Prompt Now
In 1997, when I actually began a little fledgling computer business,
only a small group of 
people had any real interest in that new fangled
Internet thingy. Fast forward a mere 3 years, and we had our first
stock market crash brought on in part by over exuberance in the
technology sector, with Internet stocks of all stripes crashing through
the floor.
I see Artificial Technology now at a similar point in our socioeconomic history as was the Internet in the late 1990s. In a very short amount of time AI has gone from an underground and behind the scenes actor in business and academia to taking our orders at the local fast food drive-thru. The impact AI is now having across all economic sectors — and will increasingly continue to do so — affects of us all in ways unimaginable. As was the case with the Internet, these new AI technologies can not and will not be ignored for too long.
The chart to the
left from
Pew Research shows
the many ways Artificial Intelligence is currently in use. One
example listed here is "product recommendations."
It is the AI telling you to buy product X because you last bought
product Y. This is AI in your face and your life right now. The
chart also shows how limited is the average American's knowledge of how
AI affects all of us now. Ignorance, however, is seldom all that
blissful.
More and more common computer tasks will include AI being pushed at all users. Soon, Bing will be advising users of Microsoft 365 (formerly called Office) on better ways to write that email or Word document. Microsoft will introduce its "Copilot" AI add-on to Office. This new feature is being tested by 600 select enterprises now, but Copilot will be a default in Office before you know it. If you cannot recognize the presence of Artificial Intelligence, then how will you know that the AI is being pushed at you? Indeed, how will you take back control of that application from the AI, if you cannot recognize the presence of the AI?
"Not a Microsoft user," you may say? Google has similar plans to integrate its Bard AI in Gmail and Google Docs. Although somewhat behind the curve, Apple Computer is developing its own plans for integrating AI into its products. As reported March 14, 2023, in GizMondo, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, summed up very well the IT industry's position on AI, when he said in a blog post:
We’re now at a pivotal moment in our AI journey... Breakthroughs in generative AI are fundamentally changing how people interact with technology — and at Google, we’ve been responsibly developing large language models so we can safely bring them to our products. Today, we’re excited to share our early progress.
It is, therefore, incumbent upon anyone who wishes to at least maintain the
veneer of some modicum of control over
their own lives to learn, if
not the nuts, bolts and how-to's of AI, at least the principles of AI,
and how to identify its incursion into the humdrum events of your daily
life. Because that's what coming. The historical
momentum already in motion will not be stopped.
That old saw first coined by Thomas Paine, and
subsequently adopted by so many over the centuries, applies to AI: "Lead,
follow, or get out of the way." Except that there will be
no way to get out of the way of the oncoming AI parade.
It has always been the case, but now more true than ever, that Knowledge Is Power. Central to understanding AI is mastering the prompt. It is the AI prompt that will soon be prodding you to do this or that in Word or Outlook. Writing an effective AI prompt is an exercise in applied logic. By learning to write an AI prompt, you will gain an understanding of how AI does its technological magic. A good basic knowledge of AI prompt techniques, and how to work with the prompt, will give any user the knowledge and skill set to decide what the AI is doing when it finally shows up in Outlook, Word, or Gmail. Mastering the prompt, and how the AI responds to the prompt, will give users some experience to decide whether an AI session will best answer the question at hand, or will traditional search offer the most useful response. You might find the skill of prompt writing to be actually useful along with the AI itself. Or shrug it off. Along with the AI itself. As long as you can.
If you consider yourself a creative type of person, then the AI image generation apps will seem to have been made for you. After a little hands on with an AI image generator, you will quickly learn how to take whatever mental image is in your mind and turn that mental image into a jpg, gif, or png file. Whatever visual medium an artist may work with, from cameras to clay, the AI image generation will definitely augment your work. Yet, here again, it is carefully wording and punctuation of the prompt that will best generate the image you trying to get.
After generating a few images or textual passages, any user will be able to easily recognize AI generated content whenever and wherever it shows up. The prose generated by the AI has a certain unique voice and style that is best described as mellifluous and slightly feminine. No matter the topic, the AI text generated has a certain Hallmark Card vibe to it. Although there are many examples of quite convincing AI generated images, the vast majority of images generated have a certain garish and cartoonish visual style to the pictures generated. Again, I believe all this is valuable information whether you intend to use the AI or not in your everyday computing.
It is through my own trial and error with the AI that has helped me to know when the question is best given to the AI, or would Search best give me what information I am trying to find. I use Microsoft's Bing AI to test a hypothesis. Is the issue that I am trying to develop a thesis around still current or was it ever true? If my hypothesis is given validation by the Bing AI, then I will use Google Search to collect the facts that will be used to develop my thesis and prove the hypothesis to be true. I am more than grateful that I can create the background scene for any image and no longer have to credit a clipart artist or accept the least worst of all possible choices for the image background. And that is exactly the point, here. Every computer user has at one time or another felt a unique sense of personal satisfaction that comes with taking control of the machine, as opposed to the vice versa. Mastering any new computer concept or application gives one a sense of personal autonomy that one did not have before the adoption of the new technology.
It is also why I see this moment in time very similar to the time of the early Internet. When describing the World Wide Web in 1999 to someone who had no real hands on experience with Internet technology, the World Wide Web would have sounded a lot like television at the fin de siècle. Five years later, that same once Internet skeptic was swapping pics of grandkids or other things like a seasoned pro. Why the transformation? He learned to use a computer connected to the Internet and found out that improved his life more than he could have imagined before adopting the Internet.
Since the AI toothpaste is not going back into the toothpaste tube, I say it's time you learn to brush your teeth. Learn AI now.
