AI News, Offerings and Education – Techstrong AI Podcast EP4

Hello and welcome to the Techstrong AI podcast. This is our fourth week of this brand new podcast. I'm Amanda Razani and I'm here with Mike Baard.

Mike, how are you doing? I'm well, how are you? Doing well.

Okay. Well if you haven't been here and seen the first few, I encourage you to go back and watch those. We are going to discuss many issues in ai, including regulations and tools and technology and use cases.

So with that, I'm gonna kick it off to Mike. Alright. We have an article up on Techstrong AI talking about how there's a little bit of skepticism in the world when it comes to the promises that the big tech vendors are making about their ability to help police how AI might be abused in our elections.

And um, it's kind of part and parcel of larger conversation that's starting to be had about what is the appropriate level of regulation here. It seems to me that whatever it is that the big tech vendors are thinking about doing, it isn't gonna be done in time for this election cycle and there's a lot of elections going around in the world at this time. So I don't know what the right answer here is, but what's your sense of, um, what are we seeing in election interference or for that matter, flat out misinformation?

Yeah, absolutely. I do understand why these companies are coming together because there has already been some election interference with some phone calls, um, impersonating Biden and robo calls and messages to get people to vote one way or the other. Um, and, you know, all the deep fakes and uh, nobody really trusting what they're seeing.

So we have some big companies in big tech, like you said, that came to together like, um, Adobe and Amazon and McAfee and LinkedIn and several big um, companies. And it's good that they are invested in, in trying to help in this matter, but I think, um, the US lawmaker's concern is this is just volunteering, um, you know, voluntary, um, agreement from these companies, but there needs to be real laws and regulations in place. So maybe working with these companies, which we are seeing, um, and using their knowledge and expertise and, um, coming together to form these regulations quickly so that there are some ground baseline, um, that we can go off of.

Um, now whether or not, you know, bad actors adhere to that is another story, but at least we have some rules and regulations. I feel like whoever loses is gonna scream bloody murder about this, and that's gonna be one of the issues of the days that the regulations will get very prescriptive coming outta Washington because it might be the one thing that politicians agree on is that there's too much at stake in there to all it's their jobs and salaries as a result of all this. So they might be a lot more aggressive in these circumstances than they have historically been in any other industry.

Not sure it'll hold up in a court, but, um, I feel like a fight's coming. Yeah, absolutely. And, and there's gonna probably be skepticism no matter what side of the fence you're on, but there's gonna be skepticism that these rules are being made, um, in the certain best interests of certain political, you know, interests or, or whatnot or certain enterprise interests.

Um, so there's just gonna have to be some, some collaboration and, and, um, coming together on this. I wonder if there might be some good out of all this, and I know this may be a little on the overly optimistic side, but let's say we spend a lot of time talking to people about this issue and, and the fact that there are deep fakes and that the AI can be abused for any number of purposes. Do you think people will become more skeptical of what it is that they're looking at online and is that not a good thing?

Because sometimes I feel like a lot of the issues that have played us in the past where, you know, people were putting up all kinds of stuff in the last election cycle that, you know, they quote unquote believe that turned out to be not true. So maybe we will get to the point where people go, let's assume that what I'm being presented is not true unless I can verify it from someplace that is trusted. I mean, can we get maybe that's where we're headed.

Yeah, maybe that everything is just assumed to be fake news until proven otherwise. Uh, but I mean, let's hope that we can, you know, trust the media and find a way to, to, to verify that what we're looking at is true. Um, I know that they're, they're working on ways to prove that ai, you know, when AI is, um, an imposter and what's real with, you know, water markings and um, just awareness campaigns and um, I think that's a big part of it is just, um, awareness campaigns to help people recognize, you know, what is possibly AI and then how to recognize if it's real or not.

Hmm. And that kind of brings us to another story that's up on the site. It's about data privacy and regulation and um, I'm not sure you noted this, but FTC sent a letter to all those people who are building AI platforms, telling them that um, you know, you cannot or should not change your, uh, terms and conditions to alter the fact that you may have told people initially you weren't gonna use their data to train your next generation of your AI model.

And then you know how those terms and conditions are, nobody reads them and they're five miles long. And I guess, you know, you could wake up one day thinking that, geez, I thought I told those guys not to use my data to train that AI model. And the next thing you know it is being used to train that AI model.

So, um, I wonder if people are gonna have a greater appreciation for what does happen to their data online and, and the privacy implications. We've seen a lot of privacy laws that are floating around. I don't think that, uh, there's a national one, at least not in the US as there seems to be an effort in the eu.

But um, do you think, you know, AI might wake us up about this whole issue in the US Yes, and I mean, whereas like just like you said, there is one in the EU and it's pretty stringent and um, you know, so it is requiring even those in the US or they're gonna have to adhere to these guidelines. And how do they backtrack if they've already used the data and how do they remove that? That would be pretty difficult I'd say.

But, um, it is gonna make them have to stand back and take a lot more time and getting, um, um, agreement to use data from the consumers and um, how they go about utilizing the tools moving forward. I think my issue with this whole thing is that we don't have a national effort in the us so as a result there's 52 states and some of the states are taking a leading role more so than others, but we could, in the short term at least wind up with 52 different data privacy regulations that are slightly variance of each other and um, that would just make it too hard for people to do business. So do you think we need to maybe accelerate this conversation at the national level?

And I know we have a congress that doesn't like to actually do much, but um, do you think we can raise this topic and maybe get some sort of bipartisan conversation going on? Because otherwise businesses are gonna be, you know, hamstrung by 52 different regulations? Yeah, I think it definitely they need to bring together some experts and, you know, form some sort of committee that focuses just on this issue because data seems to be at the root of everything.

So, you know, complying to the data laws is, is gonna be top of mind for everybody. Yeah. I'm just worried it's all gonna be too little too late.

'cause by the time Congress gets around to passing any law takes 'em at least a year, maybe more just to get it through the committees and onto the floor for a vote and then onto the president's desk. So, um, in the meantime there are gonna be a lot of, um, I wouldn't call 'em bad actors, but they're just gonna, you know, look at the letter of the law and act accordingly and they're gonna start taking data and do all kinds of things with it. We are trying to reign in these data brokers even before AI came along and now those people will be selling all kinds of, uh, information about us that's both true and inferred.

Um, you know, at some point, um, will the average individual just kind of raise their hand at some point and just start saying, Hey, you're not gonna do business with companies that are doing business with data brokers? Yeah, I mean, I think there are gonna be be people that are really guarding their data, but I know a lot of other people, like probably I'll say myself included, that just assumes my data is out there all over the place for everyone and whatever. Like I know maybe that's not the best approach, but at this point it just seems like we're open books, let's deal with it.

Everybody's an open book To that point. Um, we have another story up on the site talking about how Samsung is infusing AI into their smartphones. And I think we've seen this before with, um, I think it was Google or somebody who's using AI where you can go in and remove people from photos and change all kinds of things that are inside that photo that you might not like.

But the trouble with that is you're kind of changing reality again and you're using AI to create your own, call it a deep fake if you will. Um, and now this is gonna be a capability in everybody's hands. And so now we have AI in every smartphone that can be used to create an image that may or may not be real.

Um, is this gonna be, you know, both the quote unquote killer app for AI and the thing that kills ai because everybody's gonna be like, well, I can't trust anything that even my kids are sending me. 'cause for all I know they just made it up. Yeah, I mean that is a concern and it goes along with deep fakes and things like that, but at the same time, that's a really neat feature that it has with the, the photo editing where you can like crop out problems on the photos and you know, if something, you know, photo bombs that you want removed outta there, if you wanna change the scenery or if you wanna look a little bit better, um, making it a lot easier to edit the photos, which I personally like.

Um, and, and then I don't know if you've seen the commercial where you can circle, like if you come across something on your phone, you can circle it and do a, a search for that item just by circling the picture and it'll pop it up. So that's pretty cool. All right.

So you're kind of saying, you know, reality be, damn, we're all entitled to our own personal fantasies on the phone and we can turn 'em into anything we want. 'cause Well, especially if it's our images, why not? Yeah, exactly.

All right. I guess I'm with you. Um, I wonder where else this is gonna go.

I mean, we're talking about it from the perspective of the smartphone, but there's a lot of AppSec on those smartphones and, uh, are they all gonna have their own little AI engine in it or are they all gonna use some sort of AI engine that's baked into the phone by Samsung or wherever it's gonna be, or probably some combination thereof. And all these little AppSec are gonna have AI agents that talk to each other on my phone and made me do things together without me actually knowing a whole lot about what they're up to till somebody presents me something at the back end of this thing. So, um, you know, know, are we all gonna have either one personal assistant or multiple many personal assistants that are all doing tasks and functions and, you know, and how will the average person keep track of all that on?

What do you think? It's probably gonna be a bunch of multiple, like you said, and the goal will be that we get so reliant on them that then we're going to pay for all of them. Um, and I know that in those new AI models that Samsung just rolled out, they said that they will only be free till 2025 as far as a guarantee of free use of the, of the AI and the AppSec that are there.

So I guess they're hoping that eventually that's exactly what will happen and everybody will want to pay for all these services. Well, if it's anything like my current television bill, I've noticed that, uh, ever since, uh, we started getting all these little subscription services that we're spending about 150% more on television than we were when they were all bundled services. So, uh, I'm kind of missing the battle days when, you know, there was one cable provider who was basically, I felt like they were gouging me then, but now I've figured out that I'm just being gouged by more people than ever.

I know. It's really actually funny that, you know, this big move was made away from cable because of how expensive it is. And now I have Prime, I have Hulu, I have, you know, all the Discover Plus and Apple and you know, when you start to add all these different services up, oh my goodness, and then all the AppSec and everything, it's a lot of individual amounts that add up to a lot every month.

Maybe there'll be an AI program that'll help sort this out for us. So I can counter the AI programs that are being used to get me to watch stuff. I can now have an AI program that will figure out how to watch something at the least cost leeway possible.

That's a good idea. All right. My AI could beat up your AI one more time.

All right. We also have another story there on the site. Um, I think it's by Brian Ballou, but, um, it's talking about, um, university of Pennsylvania, I think it is, is now offering a, uh, degree in AI for folks, if you want to go study that.

I mean, I think, um, we've had advanced computer science programs for a long time, but this one seems to be more at, uh, giving people the basic skills and understanding of how to succeed in business with AI or succeed in anywhere else with ai. Um, are we just gonna see these kinds of courses everywhere? I mean, and I, and I'm scratching my head because, well, let's say I wanted to study accounting.

Would I not need to know how to master prompt engineering and AI within the context of accounting or, you know, am I gonna have a degree in AI specifically when AI is everywhere? I'm confused. Well, I think as you know, as long as AI is gonna keep infiltrating almost every business sector, it's gonna become a class or two within many different degrees, would be my thoughts on it.

So whether it's communications, whether it's healthcare, whether it's accounting or specific, you know, it fields AI is gonna be offered in a a class or two as part of that. That'd be my guess. Yeah, I kind of feel the same way about prompt engineering.

You see all these jobs for prompt engineers, and I scratch my head about that as well, because if you're gonna survive in this world, you're gonna have to know how to string together a couple of prompts. It's like basically the same skills that you would use to use a search engine to go look for something more specifically than just, you know, tell me where the nearest restaurant is. Um, and I think there's, um, a desire to kind of create new jobs and to kind, uh, maybe drive training programs and all this other stuff.

But, um, I feel like maybe we're all gonna have to go back to school on some level to figure out how to use all this AI stuff, and maybe we should get started on that sooner than later. And they might be offered us, say, extracurricular electives or continuing education classes where we can go back learn specific skills like with prompt engineering or just general AI understanding and things. Yeah, I don't know.

Are you ready to go back to school or what do you think? Or you just wanna take a couple online classes and you'll be good or, you know, do we need to all like go spend six months somewhere at some university? Okay, so me personally, I, if I could be, would be a career student, I love gonna school and I'm, I am a certification junkie, so I'm always in the middle of a certification.

So, um, I, you know, but I am actually seeing a lot more people becoming more like me and having strings of certifications and always trying to go and jump on the next thing and learn about it. So at least to a small degree, learning about it just from, of course, because of the content that I cover, I'm always wanting to learn about things. And so there's all these online certifications, making it really simple.

All right, I'm on the opposite extreme. I'm a big fan of the hands-on training just usually while you're working with it. And, um, you know, I can never wrap my head around why anybody wanted an MBA because by the time you got it and paid for it, you'd be 10 years later before you actually got the return on investment on that.

So, um, I'm sure there's a couple of people out there who are MBAs going, wait a minute, I disagree with that. But, you know, to each his own as they say. All right, well that's all we got for this week.

So anything else? I think we've covered a lot of topics and issues and I just wanna say thank you to our audience for staying tuned and watching our fourth week of this podcast. And again, if you miss the first, um, one, two, and three, go back and, um, listen to those and stay tuned for next week.

And thanks again, Mike. All.