Welcome back, Insiders! 

When my son was a toddler, he was frightened by thunderstorms. We lived in Singapore at the time so thunderstorms were a regular occurrence. We would turn up some music, close the curtains, and wait for it to pass. 

When we moved back to the U.S., he was disappointed to learn that thunderstorms are also a regular occurrence during humid East Coast summers. I showed him a video of the science behind thunder and lightning with the perfect amount of 7-year-old detail and animation. Once he understood the causes and the science behind them, thunderstorms turned into a cool phenomenon. 

This has proven to be true again and again. Knowing how something works (airplanes, the circulatory system, the northern lights), goes a long way in bringing comfort. 

This week, as I scrolled through various AI headlines and interesting news stories, I was struck by the following: 

👗 Met Gala Deepfakes of Katy Perry and Rihanna Went Viral. Why It’s a Warning for Businesses: Neither celebrity was actually at the Met Gala, though there are plenty of images on the internet to suggest otherwise. 

😟 AI Warfare is Already Here: A story about Project Maven, the government’s AI initiative to bring AI to the battlefield. Not necessarily a new initiative but one that is being re-examined given the ongoing violence in the Middle East. 

😡 Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete this Revolting Apple Ad: Apple announced its new generation of iPads and then launched a controversial ad to promote it. In the one-minute spot, creative tools – like a piano, cameras, instruments – are crushed into oblivion, putting many AI naysayers’ fears on full display.

If you were at all leery about AI, there are plenty of stories to prove you right. Turn up the music, close the curtains and hope it will pass. 

But then I saw this from the Economist: Disinformation is on the rise. How does it work? Understanding it will lead to better ways to fight it. 💡

I was reminded of my curious kid. The more we know about AI and understand how it works, the more optimistic we might feel. 

If you’ve ever asked a large language model (like ChatGPT) to write something, you might have noticed it’s eager to respond with “delve” in the text. Many LLMs are "quality tested" in places like Nigeria where delve (and other bot favorites like leverage, explore, and tapestry) are more commonly used. (This article does an excellent job explaining exactly how these models are trained and tested.)  

If you find it a little unnerving to read about how reporters are writing about their new AI friends; how you can create an AI likeness of a deceased loved one via a “deadbot”; how you can practice that difficult conversation with colleagues using a chatbot; how a group of friends interact with their phone as if it was another human – it can hear! It can see! It can talk! – then dig a little deeper. 

Without context, any of these capabilities could be weird and scary but even a minimal understanding of how the technology works, should provide some amount of reassurance. It’s not magic or spirits or wizardry. It's complex, high-level math, algorithms and data-based predictions.

It’s tempting to bury your head in the covers and hope the AI storm passes, but there’s more value in learning how it works to understand its true power. Yes, there are deepfakes, but there are also stories like Randy Travis’ (who with the help of AI, can make more music). There are stories of AI warfare but there are also stories of governments using AI to improve public services. There is the fear that AI is crushing creativity, but there is evidence to suggest the opposite – like developing new medicines. 

If we understand that OpenAI’s new GPT-4o isn’t actually human, but a multimodal AI model trained to act human, it might change how we interact with it. 

So again, I offer a bi-weekly reminder: Artificial intelligence is artificial. It’s powerful but it's just a tool.  

Below, you can read about how businesses in retail and manufacturing are using AI (like Vision AI) as a tool to streamline processes and improve operations. Listen to how alwaysAI continues to focus on providing practical value using powerful AI tools. 

If you've made it this far, thank you (for reading) and for being here to learn along with us so we can stay focused on the cool phenomenon that is AI.  🫶