What is Generative AI?

As I would explain it to my mom

Table of Contents:

• Why am I doing this?
• What is Generative AI?
• How can I use it?
• How can it benefit me?
• What are some of the concerns?

Why Am I Doing This?

After initially publishing my blog I received a handful of messages from friends and old colleagues with some suggestions, one of them being to cover hot topics and provide a simplified explanation of them. My very first supervisor and colleagues in the industry were wise beyond measure, I entered a work center as the youngest by many years and had to learn to always be a sponge. I was taught multiples lessons that to this day I teach my students and anyone I mentor. The largest of those lessons is to continue learning a topic until you can explain it to someone who is not from your industry, in terms that they understand. At the time, I had a handful of people I would practice this with (with their permission) and one of them was my mom, always interested to learn and always asking questions to make me question whether I really knew something. Almost like r/ELI5 (explain like I am 5).

An image I asked Gen AI to generate of a Latino man writing a blog with a steam punk design

What Is Generative Artificial Intelligence?

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is like a set of magical virtual hands, you ask them to perform and action or create something and they do, but its almost like the old PBJ sandwich analogy so commonly told to computer science students. You say open the bread and the bag gets torn open. The more specific you are, the more the system is able to help. For instance, you ask the magical hands to draw a man at a computer and you get just that, the more specific you are — the closer you get. The image above this was generated with Microsoft Copilot. The beauty of Gen AI though, is that it can create custom text, music, art, and all kinds of other products for you.

How Can I Use It?

There are a multitude of tools out there to use it and in fact, AI is the new buzzword that seems to be thrown onto most products today. For instance, Apple recently announced the integration of ChatGPT, a product from OpenAI into their operating system, which would put the tool in devices that already in so many peoples hands. Other offerings include products like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and ChatGPT. Some of these products can create images, text, and even audio. The list continues to grow more and more each day it seems.

How Can It Benefit Me?

The Harvard Business Review did a great write up on generative AI and what people are doing with it in it they said “It can be used to help us think, learn, do, solve, create and enjoy.” This summarizes it well, you can use generative AI for brainstorming, content creation, personal branding, programming, proofreading, research, and learning.

A screenshot from ChatGPT’s homepage

For example, I participated in a large scale incident response exercise and analysts were able to use generative AI to multiply the speed at which they were comfortable analyzing artifacts and utilizing these tools to identify actions from the adversary. I recently chose to learn SwiftUI and make an iOS application and used Gen AI to catch some complex mistakes I was unable to identify on my own. Some tools like Copilot have vacation planners, fitness trainers, and cooking assistants built right into their toolbar.

The sidebar of Microsoft Copilot

What are Some of the Concerns?

By this point, you hopefully realize Generative AI is extremely powerful, but with all good comes some bad. Now, I won’t be talking about AI taking our jobs (even though it probably would have done a better job with this write up haha), but I will talk about some of the major concerns that come with it. Some of these concerns include “hallucinations”, deepfakes, data privacy, cybersecurity, and copyright issues.

Generative AI runs on a backend that uses training data from either the internet or real people. With this they can sometimes produce biased or incorrect responses — these are hallucinations. A loose and distant example of this was Microsoft’s Tay chat bot, which did not last very long when first released.

Deepfakes have been a fear and concern for a short amount of time in comparison to the age of the internet, in 2023 Merriam-Webster added it to the dictionary with the following definition:

An image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said

This continues to be a concern with how much simpler the technology is to access. These deepfakes can be used to spread misinformation, attack people, and deceive the population. In fact, multiple governments entities such as the NSA and the Canadian government, have released statements about concerns they have with deepfakes.

Data privacy is at the forefront for many people and organizations, in fact some have said that data is worth more than oil. Organizations have concerns that some employees will use Gen AI to boost productivity, but in the process feed some of their private data into the learning models. In fact, Italy banned ChatGPT over privacy concerns in 2023.

A topic near and dear to my heart with Gen AI is cybersecurity, it is actually a conversation I find myself having frequently with friends, family, and clients. I don’t like reinventing the wheel, as I keep saying…probably too much now…, so I always steer people toward a multitude of reports/articles written. One of them being the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre Report on “The near-term impact of AI on the cyber threat”. They summarize the concern well in one of their key judgements shown below. Another great example is a write up from Morgan Stanley on “AI and Cybersecurity: A New Era”.

AI lowers the barrier for novice cyber criminals, hackers-for-hire and hacktivists to carry out effective access and information gathering operations. This enhanced access will likely contribute to the global ransomware threat over the next two years.

Finally, copyright issues, the legal implications of using Gen AI are still unclear with relation to copyright infringement and ownership of AI generated content. Another major concern is with training the models themselves, if they are trained on copyrighted material without licensing it could lead to issues of infringement. But, what if you generated a super cool image with a complex and detailed prompt using Gen AI? Well, the answer is unclear at the time of this writing who owns it.

Thanks!

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, feel free to let me know or reach out. Just a disclaimer that these are totally my personal opinions. Gen AI is a powerful tool and I encourage everyone to at least give it a try, you never know what it might give you.