The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Robert Plotkin, Co-Founder of Blueshift IP, Leading Expert on The Impact of AI on Innovation

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

Robert Plotkin, Co-Founder of Blueshift IP, Leading Expert on The Impact of AI on Innovation Blueshiftip.com Robert Plotkin is a leading expert on the impact of AI on innovation. His book, The Genie in the Machine, was the first (and still the only) work to address the impact of creative AI on innovation and the patent system. As an MIT-educated computer scientist, inventor, and patent attorney specializing in software patents for over 25 years, he has unique insights into how to leverage AI in innovation and how to navigate the patent system in the wake of increasingly creative AI. Robert is also an experienced podcaster with nearly 100 episodes and is a highly sought after podcast guest for his breadth of expertise.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

The Chris Voss Show. Thechrisvossshow.com. You've got gotta love it how many podcasts have an opera singer they hired to come in and do their work for them like serious we're that classy and highbrow no we're not anyway guys welcome to the big show we certainly

appreciate you the chrisfoshow family this family loves you but doesn't judge you at least not as harshly as your mother at time you burned her casserole so there you go don't do that anymore folks because she's still angry about it to this day she will never forgive you because that's how women work uh anyway guys uh we have an amazing guest on the show we're gonna be talking about ai artificial intelligence and he is a leading expert on the impact of ai on innovation we're going to be discussing all these different formats today. And if you're

not paying attention yet, AI is the future and it may replace some of us in jobs. There's rumors that I might get replaced by AI, but they can't find any AI good looking enough and funny enough yet. But there's still time. He is Robert Plotkin, and he joins us on the show today to talk about his insights and how you can, you know, basically do better with AI in the coming future, the future times. I feel like there should be a Terminator music that comes up here. I always kind of feel that way when I watch those AI things in Boston Dynamic. His book, The Genie and the Machine, was the first and still the only work to address the

impact of creative AI and innovation and the patent systems. As an MIT-educated computer scientist, inventor, and patent attorney specializing in software patents for over 25 years. He has unique insights into how to leverage AI in innovation and how to navigate the patent system in the wake of increasingly creative AI. He's also an experienced podcaster with nearly 100 episodes and is highly sought after as a podcast guest in breadth of his expertise. Welcome to the show, Robert. How are you? I am doing great, Chris. Thanks so much for having us. There you go. Yeah, yeah. And I'm so excited to talk about exactly what you mentioned, the fear of being replaced and the hope and promise that AI brings to us as creators, innovators, podcasters

of all types. There you go. Hope springs eternal, eternal as always and i'm kind of hoping a lot for this ai stuff because you know i saw the terminator movies it didn't end well uh or maybe it did i don't know depends on which one you watch i guess but after like the second one none of them really were well uh anyway moving on uh so give us your dot coms where do you want people to find you on the interest please yeah you can, you can go to BlueShiftIP.com. That's my law firm where we help innovative companies and individuals to obtain patent protection for their software and AI inventions. You can check me out on LinkedIn, which is LinkedIn.com slash in slash Robert Plotkin. And on our website, you can, there's tons of free content, blog posts,

podcasts of our own, recorded webinars, all on software, innovation, AI, and intellectual property protection. Okay. So your book,

Genie in the Machine, How Computer Automated Eventing is Revolutioning Law and business you published this in 2009 yeah i mean i've been fascinated with this question of how ai can automate creativity create automate the process of inventing for a really really long long time. In fact, it really goes back to the first time I ever used a computer, which was when I was a kid. I remember going back when I was in fifth grade. This was around 1982 or so. I was in public school. Brooklyn, New York is where I grew up. And the school had just gotten two TRS-80s. For those people of a certain age, they remember those

Radio Shack computers. They were black and white. There was no internet. They didn't have a hard drive. And it was the first computer I had ever seen. I mean, I think it was the first computer anyone in the school had ever seen. The teachers didn't know how to use it. We didn't know what it was. And my teacher had some sort of a book that taught her how to teach us how to write programs in BASIC, I remember. BASIC, yeah. BASIC. And I distinctly remember my first experience, which she had us sit down and type a two-line program in, which was line 10 said print my name is Robert. I had to fill in Robert.

Type that in. And then line 20, go in Robert, type that in. And then line 20, go to 10, type that in, type in run. And then what would the program do? Just print, my name is Robert over and over and over again, endlessly over the screen. Now that doesn't impress anyone these days, but I remember feeling at that point, wow, here's a machine that I can make it do what I want by typing in commands in a language.

Really, it really captivated me as a 10-year-old kid. That is what spurred my lifelong interest in and obsession with computers. And I think that I'm sure many people have had a similar type of experience when they first used ChatGPT. That feeling of, oh, wow, I can tell it what I want it to do in words. And it can do that. It can write something for me. It can answer a question. It can speak to me in natural language. That feeling of empowerment and of the ability to command and instruct a computer to do what you want it to do and then have it carry out that instruction. years of my personal interest in computers and my career, you know, innovating myself and working with innovators. And I've watched the development of the technology where it's gotten more and more able to translate instructions from someone in increasingly natural language into more and more powerful results. And I think that's why tools like ChatGPT have just taken the world by storm and captivated people because they capture that essence of what I called in the

book, the genie in the machine, the computer as something that could carry out your wishes and grant them. And we're really seeing that come to fruition with the latest instances of large language models and tools like ChatGPT. There you go. Now, for people out there who are still trying to adapt and adopt AI, what is AI, if you can describe it for people to lay a foundation for the definition of that? Yeah. In the technical world, there's no standard agreed upon definition. There's been endless debates for 60 more years about exactly what it means. I mean, usually people use that term to mean technology that can do things which previously required human intelligence to do.

Right? So, ChatGPT, you can tell it, write me a blog post about podcasting, and it can do that. You know, before large language models came along, you needed a human, a human mind and body to do that, and now it can do that. So, we would call that artificial intelligence. But the definition seems, you know, it evolves over time as computers become capable of doing more and more. We keep raising the bar for what qualifies as artificial intelligence.

But that ability to do things that, you know, traditionally had required human thought, creativity, even consciousness, that's generally what people mean when they refer to AI. Okay. So how does AI supercharge innovation? Why is it such a driver for that in your mind? Yeah. I mean, it's because it can help people to create things. It can't truly take over the task of creating things on its own. But I really like to use an analogy to Thomas Edison, who's one of the great innovators of all time. We all know him as the inventor of at least the first commercially successful light bulb back in his day, over 100 years ago, when he was working on that. He had to put in an incredible amount of manual effort. He was known for this phrase, this saying, which was genius is 1% inspiration, 99%

perspiration. And what does that mean? He knew when he was trying to create that light bulb, he needed to have a filament in it that you could run electricity through that would cause it to give off light. Sounds easy. But in practice, he had to test out thousands of materials over the course of over a year to find the one that would work. That was the perspiration. OK, just coming up with the bright idea that a light bulb could work if you ran electricity through it wasn't enough. He had to do all of that experimentation. And finally, he picked a material which was carbonized bamboo. These days, if he had an AI tool at his side, what he would probably do is configure a system to simulate thousands of materials, test them out in a simulator, evaluate them,

and then come up with a small number that maybe he would test out in the real world. That's how a lot of drugs are being developed right now. All kinds of materials, circuits, even software, where the computer is taking the place of a lot of the experimentation that in the old days used to require real world physical effort. So that's just one example of a way in which AI is supercharging innovation. And it's enabling people to focus more on the inspiration side of things, coming up with ideas, high level designs, and then leaving the low level

detail work to the ai to figure out wow it's it's uh crazy what's going to go on and it seems like we're entering a new innovation stage that is just scaling so fast like i've just seen the short time that i've seen you know there's a lot of AI that's out there, but chat GPT seems to be the Xerox term for AI these days. It seems to be, you know, what Xerox did with copiers where anytime someone said a copier even was owned by, you know, Panasonic, it was like Xerox. But it just seems like it's scaling so fast and head whipping. I've seen just so many things. People do different stuff with it. Is AI going to replace human authors, artists,

inventors? You know, if I'm out there and listening to this, do I have to go, oh my God, is my job going to get replaced by AI? What's the ups and downsides there? Yeah. I mean, of course, I think every conversation I have about AI raises a fear of being replaced by it. I mean, it's a real fear. And I think what I want to emphasize, if there's one thing I want people to take away from our conversation today, it's that if you learn how to use AI and how to collaborate with it, see it as a tool or even as a partner with you, you can supercharge your creative and innovative skills to become even more effective, efficient, productive as a creator whether that's a writer an artist podcaster inventor an engineer and you won't be replaced by it there is a phrase a lot of people are using right now which i agree with which is you won't be replaced by ai you'll be replaced by a human who uses ai

which means that if you don't want that to happen, you need to become a human who learns how to use AI. I'm still working on the becoming human part. I'm still mastering that. I'm 55. I'm still, I'm years away from finishing that project. You know, and we can take any example. Writing is a good one where we've seen a whole progression of tools. I mean, go back hundreds of years. Obviously, the printing press was the big one, which brought books to the masses. I remember that. Yeah.

That was the whole ink thing, the blotter, ink blotter and stuff. I always got that on my fingers. That was awful. Yeah. They had to put all the letters in the way. It took me a long time to print my book that way so remember those days yeah uh typing word processing we all have seen spell checking grammar checking those are starting to get more towards the towards the um automation side of the

spectrum a tool like chat gT obviously takes the automation of writing a big step further by being able to generate text for you, but it's not going to do the whole thing for you. If you want to write even a blog post, it can do a decent first draft or give you some ideas, and then you can use that to revise or to polish. It can help you produce things more quickly, but it's not going to replace you if you're a really skilled writer. And I'd say the same is true for any field that you're in. You know, you in podcasting, you could use a tool like that to come up with ideas for questions that you want to ask people. There's so many ways to use it to brainstorm, generate rough ideas as a starting point or as a collaborator, so to speak. But I

don't see it as something that's going to replace people. It will very much shift the skills that people need to have and will use in their jobs, which will be learning how to leverage AI and other types of technology to get the job done. Wow. I never even thought of that. I'm going to try that idea, use ChatGPT. use chat GPT and I'll just put in the name of the person or maybe their book or whatever and, uh, and say, Hey, give me some questions for these people, uh, or, uh, write me some funny bits. That might be good. Uh, I'd like them to, I'd like you to write some jokes for me. That's what I, that's what I need to chat GPT. Yeah. Write the jokes. Uh, so there you go. Um, the, uh, there you go um the uh so you're saying that you know you've you just got to embrace this new technology i mean that's the one thing you know we've learned i forget who the what the

term is for people who resist technology and it's it's uh based on a group of people like in the 1600s or something who the luddites the luddites there you go thank you we actually had a author on who wrote a whole book about that sort of stuff from oxford college uh university and uh he uh he wrote about the luddites and how technology now there's been luddites through all of time you know whatever the new technology is you know betamax or you know only fans uh you know uh or, you know, OnlyFans, you know, Cotton Gin, you know, you name it. And there's always been people who have resisted to that. You know, even like podcasting, you know, was resisted probably one time. Like, what is this?

There's radio. Why do we need to be doing this? And so, you know, there's people that are stuck in the mud about that. But this is one of those things you really need to adapt and adopt to and try and understand. And then do you really need to look at it from an aspect of how can I use this to improve and innovate my job, my world, my tasks, what I'm doing now, and fully incorporate it and envelope it into what I'm doing so that I can raise my value in the work marketplace. If you work for other people or raise the value of what I do above what others are doing and use it, I mean, basically kind of that edge, if you will. Yeah. I mean, the fear or anxiety-based part of it is that by enabling people to do a lot of work semi-automatically, it means

everyone does have to up their game. It's being said now, a tool like ChatGPT can make everyone be at least an average writer. You don't have to be a crappy writer anymore because if you can put an idea into chat gpt it can produce a draft that's at least average so so that's the that's can generate anxiety well who's going to need me right if chat gpt can produce average output well there's two things one is if you're not very good at something it can raise you up to be at least average okay it does a really good job of leveling the playing field in that regard to give people who are at the lower end of the skill spectrum, or maybe who are junior or just entering a field, a big boost. Okay. But what it can also do, if you learn how to use it, if you're at the top of your field, if you're an expert, you need to be savvy about how to use tools alike. We'll keep using

ChatGPT, like you said, like Kleenex, but there's many other ones out there. If you're at the top of your field and you are savvy in learning how to make the most of these kinds of tools, you can also boost your skill to make you even exceed others by more than you could before. So those are the two places. What I'm concerned about, I think, is if you're in the middle, you really need to think hard about what you're going to do. I mean, you really then need to learn to leverage these tools because the people who are at the bottom end are going to get a huge boost from AI. The people at the top will be able to keep staying ahead of everyone else if they stay on top of the technology the people in the middle are the ones who are at the most risk i think of getting squeezed out

if they don't start uh updating their skills to learn how to use the latest technology there you go uh you know you're and i imagine there's a lot of field you know like i mean just about any business there's there's people that will hire you i remember when we used to first teach social media back when i first started in with twitter and different things we teach it to clients and my clients said after a course they would just be like hey man can i just pay you to do this because i don't want to have to master this skill and i would imagine there are going to people that are going to master AI and then incorporating that into whatever they do. So say like AI for PR as a PR agent and people are going to say to them, Hey man,

I don't, I don't want to learn all this stuff, but I'll pay you and it'll become an edge because it'll separate you from other people in the marketplace that, well, you're just a PR agent for this example. You're a PR agent who has a master of AI and can take things to the next level. What's going on with automated intelligence and or artificial intelligence that's automated too. Yeah, you do automate. Anyway, so, you know, this gives you

that edge, you know, that added bonus to your value. And, you know, everyone's building brands now. Your resume is a brand if you work for someone value. And, you know, everyone's building brands now. Your resume is a brand if you work for someone else and being able to master those skills. And I imagine employers are going to start asking, you know, do you know AI or maybe suggesting that you do is a benefit or you have some sort of mastery of that skill? Because I think it's going to be a feature that most employers are going to look for in how can you help them master AI. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, part of what you're talking about is the way in which AI is becoming what's called democratized.

Because it's becoming easier and easier for people to use who don't have a background in computer science or technical skills because you can interact with a tool like Jack GPT in natural language like English it means that just about anyone can use it and it means you can potentially use it to do a decent job in other fields that you don't have a background in. Like you said, marketing is a good one. Marketing is one of the fields that's being called out now as being sort of most at risk as a result of AI, meaning it's becoming possible for people who are not marketing experts to produce pretty good marketing content, blog posts, ads, YouTube video descriptions, Amazon product descriptions. There's a lot of AI tools out there now that do all that stuff. So that's just one example.

There's really good tools out there that enable you to write code, even if you have no skill in writing code in Python or C or Java or a programming language, it's not going to let you do that professionally. But it can let you, as you said exactly, maybe get your foot in the door or do some simple programming tasks. I mean, it's really opening the door wide for people to perform a wide range of tasks that they couldn't do before. And I think you're right, savvy companies will become attuned to that when they're looking to hire people, train people, and look for outsourced service providers as well. Yeah, it's going to give you the edge. The hard part is, how do I master AI? How do i get into all this stuff and just understand i mean there's so many companies now you know there's video ai there's chat gpt there's audio ai there's you know there's probably a million variations out there you know i've seen like lists of all

the vendors that you can utilize on like linkedin to publish like a giant list how do i make those first steps to try and embrace understanding AI, learning about AI, obviously probably by your book. How do I start down that road? How do I make that first step if I need to try and get down there? Yeah. And so what I'm talking about, what we're talking about now is how the non-technical person who wants to use existing AI can learn how to use it, right? We're not talking about how can someone develop a new sort of AI tool, which is a different question. How can you get into the field of machine learning, for example? It is so new and rapidly developing that most of the best stuff out there now that I've seen is online, in YouTube videos,

in blog posts, in other sort of content like that now. Things have developed in the last year and are developing week by week, sometimes day by day so much that more traditional sources like books or college courses or other courses, you know, are really lagging behind in this kind of thing. But one simple place to start is to look and do some searching on basic skills in what's called prompt engineering. That is a fancy term for learning how to write effective questions or prompts for tools like ChatGPT. Okay. That's what's being called prompt engineering. And now it may seem like there's nothing to that, that if you wanted ChatGPT to give you a recipe for a dish, you just ask it,

give me a recipe for that dish. But there are actually a wide variety of tricks and tips and best practices for how to phrase your prompts to get the best possible output. And some of those you can come up with on your own by just experimenting. Other ones you'd probably never guess. It's been pretty widely documented that if you want chat gbt to help you work through a problem you should ask it to work with you step by step literally use the phrase step by step and that will improve its its output significantly how did people figure this out researchers and other people tried tons of different types of phrasing in their prompts and just experimentally found that using the phrase step-by-step works.

Another one recently I saw was telling ChatGPT to, quote, take a deep breath before answering. Actually helps it produce better answers often. Now, that seems to make no sense because JATGBT can't take a breath. But this is why I say, if you look for articles, videos, tutorials out there on basic prompt engineering, you can learn a lot about how to get more out of a tool like that. That's one of the first steps I would suggest there you go uh it's uh it's something that you just got to learn it's just one of those things you got to step into it play with it toy with it i you know you can buy the chat gpt i think it's like 20 bucks for the basic version and you can just start mucking about with it playing with it asking questions developing a relationship, basically. Yeah. And that's just the best way to start,

I would say. And then, like I said, there's different lists of vendors that you can check out. One of the things that you're involved with with your work is patenting software and different issues with trying to make sure that your IP is protected, your intellectual property when you're dealing with stuff. Talk a little bit about what you do in that field and why that's important to maybe people that are developing software out there. I know that you can write code with ChatGPT and stuff. So what does it apply to? What sort of software is applied to and why is it important? Yeah. So most of what I do in my day job is obtain patents on innovative software, all kinds of software. It could be software for doing speech recognition, for controlling robots,

for doing autonomous driving, software for detecting network viruses, all kinds of software, any software that does something new and useful that solves a new problem or solves an old problem in a new way can be patented. And the basics of patents is that as an owner of a patent, you can stop anyone else from selling a competing product without your permission. That's what patents do for you. Now, in the realm of AI, what I find most fascinating and is at the leading edge of patenting with AI is I mentioned that AI can at least partially automate the invention of new products. There are drugs being developed, at least partially automatically using AI. There's software being written with AI. And that raises the question of, if an invention is created using AI, can you get a patent on it? And this has been

partially gone through the courts, but there's a lot of people who immediately think, well, look, if an AI can just automatically invent something new at the push of a button, two things. One, do we need human inventors anymore? And two, why do we need patents anymore? If AI can just invent anything we want at any time and anyone can use it to invent whatever we want, why do we need patents? And wouldn't patents just stifle innovation by locking up new inventions, right? I am not out of a job and why I don't think I'll be out of a job for at least the next few years is that whenever people use AI to invent something new, like a new drug, there's still a substantial amount of human ingenuity, effort, creativity that goes into that process. This is why I keep beating the drum of talking about humans collaborating with AI, not humans being replaced by AI or humans just using AI to do all of the work for them. That's not really possible now when it comes to inventing.

There's always a lot of human effort, involvement, and ingenuity behind all of these inventions that are developed using AI as a supercharger, or you could call it an inventive assistant or inventive partner. And so I obtain patents on inventions all the time that are invented with the assistance of AI. The fact that AI was used doesn't mean that these inventions can't be patented. I mean, maybe there'll come a time in the future when an AI system can just sit around and completely on its own, come up with an idea for an invention and follow that through to the end and produce the invention. And maybe if that kind of AI is widely available, we won't need a patent system anymore. But until

then, I think I'll still have a job. There you go. So when you look at, I know one of the issues with AI is stuff like chat GPT that have basically scraped the internet and collected the data and they're reselling it. It's kind of a funny joke I think Elon Musk was talking about on Twitter. There's kind of some issues there with copyright and maybe patents where, and this is a question I'm forming, is, you know, if you're using code that maybe has been scraped by ChatGPT or text that has been scraped by ChatGPT. Is that an issue that you as a lawyer

have to review for clients to try and make sure that they have a clean patent and they have a clean copyright, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, I mean, this is a very current hot issue, particularly in the context of copyright with respect to text and artwork. There are some ongoing lawsuits in progress now from content owners.

I believe the New York Times is involved in one of them. Wow. Claiming that its content was scraped in the training of the GPT model and demanding either that GPT be trained again without using the New York Times or that the Times get compensation for it. You know, copyright is a bit far afield from what I work on in patents.

But what I'll say is, you know, this is a really important issue. I do think that content creators and content owners should be, one, compensated for ways in which their works are used in development of tools like this, and there should be some mechanism for obtaining permission or authorization from content owners in the development of these tools. This was an issue recently in the entire Hollywood dispute over compensation for writers. And I know it was part of the eventual deal. This is a super hot current topic. I suspect that companies like OpenAI and the others that have released their tools did it knowing that these disputes were going to happen

and they just made a strategic decision. They were going to go ahead with it anyway, release it, shoot first, ask questions later kind of approach, and maybe hope that they'll gain enough profit in the meantime that they can pay for these lawsuits and maybe reach some kind of an amicable resolution with all of the parties involved. Again, copyright's a bit far afield from what I work on, but I'll say I do hope that a resolution can be achieved that would both enable tools, AI tools, to continue to become widely available and develop while simultaneously enabling content creators to have some control over how their works are used and to get compensation for it and to get credit for it when it's used on the on the output side i think

it's complicated but i'm sure that there's a way for that to all happen yeah i mean i don't i know that there's some author sites that are suing over author books that we used to train uh you know i don't know what i do if i saw a repeat of you know a story that was in my book that i told that's you know my personal story and if i saw somehow that was redone uh and and put into someone else's story or you know made into some i don't know some other meme story or something that i would just be like hey that's that's my personal story like what the heck you know i mean if i think you know even if you strip one line from a book if it's identifiable uh as as i don't know the copyright or the personal you you don't have an issue you know you can't you can't steal like i don't know what is it three or four notes from a line of music there's's the parody aspect of it, which is kind of interesting, but there's all of that that goes into it.

So it sounds like what your advice is to people is they need to embrace AI. They need to get themselves educated up to speed on it. By doing so, maybe they're going to be better at showing people or building their brand or making themselves more valuable than getting replaced by AI by being masters of it, in essence. Absolutely. For better or worse, if you don't do that, everyone else around you is going to be doing it. You will be left behind, but that's, again, the negative side of the positive side of things is that you have you have a lot to gain. There's so many previous historical examples in which technologies come along. That's automated. Some sort of creativity. I think about the shift from from film cameras to digital cameras,'s a much smaller leap forward but it enable enable this

huge flourishing of one enabled people with less skill less money uh to start experimenting with photography also to just shoot a much larger number of photos this type of shift in technology tends to encourage a much more free-flowing, experimental type of creativity. I mean, think about podcasts, which you're doing. Before this, if you had to own a radio station to do what you're doing, you'd have to put all this investment in. You'd maybe have to get investors. You'd have a lot more chefs in the kitchen, so to speak. And it tends to encourage a more sort of a conservative, I don't mean that politically, I mean, an approach to creating

that's much more careful, you put a lot more planning into it ahead of time, less freewheeling. You know, when you now can record this with me, I don't know if you're putting this out tomorrow and do it at very low cost. It enables you to interview more people. It enables you to spend more one-on-one time with us. It enables you to put more stuff out there and to do it in this sort of freewheeling, improvisational way. We always see that when a new kind of technology comes along. Same thing with music sampling in the past. I mean, on and on. And so chat GPT and generative AI is doing that now for text generation and for artwork

and video generation. So we're just at the beginning of that now, where it's both democratizing, opening up the field to more and more people to engage in that type of creative work. And I think we're going to see it leading to this larger volume of creative work getting out there more quickly and a more experimental form of creativity, which I'll tell you always has its detractors when it happens, right? When podcasting and before that blogging came along, people said, this is just going to lead to a deluge of junk, right? That's always what happened. People said that with the printing press hundreds of years ago. It's going to lead to a deluge of junk. That's always the argument. But i think i trust people both on the creation side and the consumer

side to to weed through that what do you speaking of junk uh recently amazon had to had to try to put some sort of regulation on ai books specifically in like travel because i think travel's like you know it's pretty factual you know you talk about how to go to France and everything's in France. It's not like you got to make up stuff. I mean, you could, if you wanted to, but, um, you know, it's pretty basic. And I guess the travel books were the first wave that got hit for AI. Um, even some people ripping off other authors, but, uh, they were just flooding the zone with these AI books. How do you feel about that?

Does Amazon just have to adapt? Do we just have to get used to the amount of books being out in the public sphere that's just stupid and crazy? Do we have to start putting an asterisk on everything to say it's kind of like baseball during the

steroids era? We have to put an asterisk on stuff and say, by the way, a human didn't generate this. Do we need to have identifiers of that? I do think that when it comes to information that purports to be factual, which can cause harm, if it's false, we need to have ways to deal with that. I just heard a story recently, and I don't know if it was someone warning about something that could happen or whether it actually happened, that someone published a book about foraging for mushrooms, right? That was encouraging people to eat deadly mushrooms. So it almost doesn't matter whether that actually happened. It's a good example of the thing we need to protect against because I can go

to ChatGPT and say, write me a book about mushrooms and then just upload it to Amazon. And in five minutes, I've got a book. And if I just upload it to Amazon. And in five minutes, I've got a book. And if I don't care whether it's true or not, and no one proofreads it, it can do a lot of harm. And in my field, the law is true too. I mean, someone relies on information about the law that's not accurate and cause a lot of harm. The key area is medicine, right? We don't want false and damaging medical information to get out there. There's a lot of areas where we really need to make sure that information is accurate and it's not practical or desirable to just rely on the consumer, right, to be their own fact checker.

And so I don't know what the answer to that's going to be. Because the question you raise is what role does the middleman like an Amazon play in that type of situation? I think it's going to vary depending on on who who the middleman is. I think if it's a company like Amazon, that's actually selling and profiting directly from the sales, they're probably going to have to play some role in verifying the accuracy, but I don't know what's going to be. It's an interesting question when it comes to fiction. I mean, maybe we let people put out lots of junk and then let the market weed that out, right? People, I would hope, just don't buy it. And then on the other hand, I mean, who's to say what is junk, right? So if people want to use AI to publish junk fiction and people buy it or

don't buy it, maybe that will just work itself out on its own as long as it's not really causing any harm. You bring up some interesting points too, where, you know, the caveat emptor still reigns, let the buyer beware, based on, you know chat gbd could be like hey maybe you should drink some bleach to fix covet i was just recently reading of someone today was prosecuted for that that's where that comes up so don't turn that into something people um you idiots uh but uh or the idiots out there um but, you know, the dangers of eating like mushrooms, like you said, maybe, you know, chat GPD doesn't discern or somehow doesn't make things. You know, it's interesting that while I'm talking to you,

I just put in what questions should I ask on the podcast with Robert Plotkin, leading expert in the impact of AI innovation. And, dude, it gave me like 15 really good questions for you kind of we've already covered here but it certainly sounded uh real professional and sort of the things in uh what we have here uh here's one good question we'll go ahead and give it some credit here um how can businesses question number seven how can businesses and individuals leverage AI to foster a culture of innovation within their organizations? And let me add a sidebar to that, if you don't mind. We'll throw in a little shot on the martini.

I think you talked in your bio that you sent me, one page, about inclusion and some of the different areas that companies are having to deal with right now. So let's throw that at you. Okay. I would say those are two different aspects of what companies can and should be doing. I'll start with the first one to foster innovation, which is I think companies should be having a culture that encourages the use of AI, unlike what a lot of schools are doing now, which I think is to have a knee-jerk reaction to ban the use of AI by students. I do understand the concern that

schools have because schools are institutions which are teaching children and adults to learn and to gain specific skills. And there are certain ways of using AI that could be used to cheat, basically, and get around the requirements and the goals of an educational system. But in businesses and other kinds of organizations, there need to be ways to encourage and promote the use of AI to get the work of the organization done to fulfill the mission of the organization effectively, efficiently, productively, all in ways that also enable individuals to advance themselves in all the ways we talked about by developing skills. And now the part that relates

to what you talked about with diversity, equity, and inclusion is we need to be really aware of the fact that most of the prominent AI tools that are out there now do what they can do because they're trained on large volumes of data. And a lot of that data, for example, ChatGPT is mostly trained on the internet. It's trained on other sources too, but the internet content is created by humans. Humans are full of bias and some of it's not very pretty. And so when OpenAI first internally was testing out ChatGPT, it produced all kinds of biased, racist, bigoted content. They had to build in filters and other stop gaps on that to stop it from doing that. Why? It was just feeding back out what it got in from us as humans.

Wow. Okay. So I just saw something the other day, which was using one of the image generators. I don't remember which one it was, but they said no matter what prompt they put in to try to get it to generate an image of an Indian person, it produced an old Indian man with a beard. And they tried putting in things like, you know, girl or boy or young. And it just kept coming up with old Indian men with beards. And I suspect that's because that was the vast majority of the images that it had been trained on. I mean, I could go on and on and on. the ways in which AI just, what do you call, propagates the biases that it was trained on, has been documented very, very widely. So if an organization is going to encourage people

within it to use AI, it has to educate people about that fact so that they can evaluate what they're getting out and understand that it's not unbiased in a sense or at least that it's it's just as it's often just as biased as the the mass of humanity is and i say that because it can be very easy uh when you use a tool like ChatGVD, it sort of seems authoritative. People tend to let their judgment almost go to sleep and just rely on what its output is. And you have to make sure that as an individual, you don't do that. And then organizations put policies and procedures and training in place so that people don't just rely mindlessly on the output of what they get, not only because of the bias issue, but just because of accuracy and relevance and everything else that you want to get out, which comes back to my main point. See the AI as a tool that gives you a starting point,

maybe helps you break through a writer's block or the equivalent of it, gives you ideas to start from, but not to end with. It's all part of the same point, really. There you go. And these are empowering tools. Instead of looking at AI as something you're going to be, oh God, I've got to deal with this. I've got to fight with this and battle on, sort of thing. These are empowering tools that you've given us on how to do it. Any final thoughts, Robert, as we go out and of course, the pitch to people

to reach out to you to use your company. Yeah, I'm just going to keep beating the drum of, I encourage everyone, if you are afraid of AI, you know, go out, test it out. There's so many free tools now. I mean, we keep saying ChatGPT. All the major companies have their own versions, Google, BARD. There's one called Clawed2 that's out there.

Microsoft is integrating things. And there's free versions. There's all kinds of stuff out there that you can play around with for free. Educate yourself, experiment, read up on all of this. And as we've been talking about, try to see this as a tool that can help you be more effective at what you do. And I think that will help assuage people's fear and even generate some excitement about it. The flip side is be aware of all of the limitations of AI, both in terms of just what it's not good at doing

and what its biases are and what kind of either harmful or inaccurate information it can generate. And if you can become really aware of what its strengths and weaknesses are and what your strengths and weaknesses are. I actually just remind, you know, Sun Tzu, Art of War, he said, right, you know, your enemies, strengths and weaknesses, know your own strengths and weaknesses. You'll never lose a battle. It's the same thing here. Know the strengths and weaknesses of both. Then

you can form a synergy between you and the AI that's really unstoppable. But if you're ignorant and you don't know what you're good at and not good at, what you don't know what the AI is good at or not good at, you might even be worse together than you are apart. So I'll leave you with that. Sounds like my first 10 marriages. Yeah. Find me at blueshiftip.com, linkedin.com slash in slash Robert Plotkin. That tends to be where I post a lot of this stuff that goes far beyond patents and intellectual property, where I post stuff about AI and creativity and innovation and human AI collaboration. Awesome, Sauce. This has been a wonderful discussion, Robert. I really love it. And I think you've helped educate and empower some people so that they can do

an innovation and be encouraged. It's funny. I'm going to use your, I'm going to use your idea to ask questions for, uh, uh, guests and come up with ideas. Cause it's always an improvement.

I think I do a pretty good job, damn it. But, uh, uh, don't replace me. Uh, but,

uh, there you go. I mean, anything you can use to make things better is a way to improve the world. So thank you very much for coming out. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. There you go.

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