On Coffee With Allan earlier, I asked the question If I wouldn’t say it to my mother, should I say it to AI? It’s a question that I asked after reading a post by Vitalii Kovalenko on SubStack. His point was losing our privacy to programs like ChatGPT etc.
The question goes to the heart of the issue of privacy, and I guess whether we still have any. We give away information about ourselves when we sign into third party sites using Google or Facebook with Single Sign On, and when we use apps like Google Maps, or even when we use a credit card.
I guess the problem is how we approach and use AI.
Rather than give all our information to a Chatbot, which in turn may or may not save that data for other uses, we should be careful what we tell it, and use it as a tool, not as our digital best friend.
My approach has been that AI helps research. I list the topics that I am researching, and I ask for checkable references. I then read and check what is presented, check the sources and go from there. At all times, I remain responsible for the thinking, and I am responsible for what I publish. I won’t ask it to write something and then just publish it. I don’t know if it’s right for a start.
Programs like Gemini, Claude and so on don’t think like us, they take data that they have been fed, and they in turn present it to us. If they have been given wrong information, they in turn pass it on.
There are other dangers as well.
I wrote here about AI generated content and a particular student who was caught for plagiarism after simply copying and pasting AI content for a paper. You can’t claim copyright for content that you didn’t right.
Right now there are two main extremes of thinking about AI. The first is that AI “knows everything anyway” so who cares. The other is that it is dangerous, and we shouldn’t go near it.
Me? I rattle around in the middle. As I said in an earlier article, a chainsaw is a great tool when I need it, but I wouldn’t use it while wearing a blindfold.
I say that as someone who uses AI (and chainsaws). I use AI to check code when I’m working on my websites, as well as for research. I even use it in my 3D printing hobby if I am having problems with my design, or my machine. But at all times, I’m in control, and I never tell it my deepest darkest secrets.
