Is AI Dangerous?

Dan·ger·ous (adjective) – able or likely to cause harm or injury. “a dangerous animal”. Likely to cause problems or to have adverse consequences. “it is dangerous to underestimate an
enemy.”
For a business owner/entrepreneur, you have to be watchful of the new technologies that are appearing in such a rapid-fire way in the workplace. We all know the usefulness of generative AI in our daily lives. Most of us are using it as an advanced Google search utility. A lot of people are bemoaning the impending demise of their careers due to AI but to the business owner, our awareness and response affects more than just ourselves. Our decisions can change the lives of people we work with.
15% – that is the magic number of employees regularly accessing these AI utilities right on the computer you have assigned to them. This increases the potential for data leaks, such as company secrets into the wild. And yet we have become more skilled and knowledgeable in the very roles we occupy in our jobs.
Double – that is the amount of increase in auto-generated emails over the past two years. You already anticipated that AI was used by the bad actors, right? Gone are those horrendous phishing attempts with their misspelled words and horrible grammar.
Overall, there is not something earth-shattering in the way AI is used but that is today and given what we know about people at work, probably 60% of accessing these GenAi platforms is being done on personal devices. Of those, how well are they protected? BYOD has never been embraced by corporate governance but this sheds a whole new license on it.
Voice assistants, messaging apps and cameras are not built with AI included into them as well as the basic operating system of your new mobile device. Sometimes it is prudent to opt-out of some of these features.
At the end of it all, it is still the same thing: users are the key. So the technology is no more
dangerous than the user…yet.