Last week I watched a viral video of a commencement where the speaker urged the new grads to build and tune their “idiot detection systems”. It’s a good speech and even better advice.
As we head into 2024 and another year of hype around AI, I’d urge everyone to make sure their AI Grift Detectors are fully functional.
How?
1. Be critical of who’s doing the writing and how much they’re invested in the narrative of the AI revolution. Is the author an ‘AI Entrepreneur’? Do they run a GenAI start-up? If 2023 taught us one thing about AI, it’s that there’s gold in them thar hills — and everyone wants you to believe they know exactly how to find it.
One trick I use to suss out gold-rushers is to Google the author’s name with the terms ‘web3’, ‘NFT’ and ‘fintech’. If they’ve word-swapped any of these terms with ‘AI’ in their bio, I’m suspicious. This isn’t to say that everyone who made the convenient pivot from crypto to AI is a grifter but if they did… *beep* *beep*
2. Look at what is being claimed. Is an entire field about to be revolutionized? Is a big complex problem about to be solved? Try to map this into a domain you know well. Think of a tough problem that involves people and politics and feelings and a lot of moving parts. How skeptical would…
