A.ll I.n

Let’s talk about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) this week. Not just because John Oliver just did his video on the same subject, because let’s be honest, we’ve all been talking about A.I. for a while now. Especially in the security industry, half of the articles I write these days are from companies working with machine learning to improve cybersecurity, or training A.I. with media to better understand threat detection in monitoring software.

Now there’s a lot of anxiety surrounding the technology for a variety of reasons. Reasons beyond the normal fear mongering Skynet reasons (Artificial Intelligence is more likely to treat us like ants than a threat). I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that those of us who write for a living don’t like the look of ChatGPT. A coworker recently gushed about how interesting the technology was and that we should give it a try, and my internal response was utter repulsion to the thought.

This isn’t John Henry versus the steam engine though, I’m not worried ChatGPT will do a better job than all of us, far from it. I personally believe the technology is decades away from being able to come close to emulating talented creators, if even in my lifetime. Current artificial intelligence is a hammer in search of nails. I DO worry that the people who hold all the money and make all the hiring decisions will point an undiscerning eye at AI-generated content and say, “good enough”.

That’s where I imagine a lot of employees in the security field are at right now. A lot of AI driven tech promises to reduce the workload of security teams, but what that might translate to instead is a need for less members on the security team, and that isn’t an unfounded fear. The industry is constantly hurting for trained and talented workers, but I suspect that instead of incentivizing the work to bring in new blood, CEOs are going to seize on this technology to fix their employment problems. Once those workers are gone they are never coming back.

I hope people will see the inherent pitfalls in that before making any rash decisions, but I must admit that one line from the episode of Last Week Tonight rang true - A.I. is here to stay, and in the future the distinction will be between workers who can use A.I., and those who can’t.

So, for now, I’ll grit my teeth, plug my nose, learn to avail myself of A.I., and keep on doing my thing. It’s not the end of the world.

But you can see it from here.