The Verdict Is In: AI Will Kill Competition BY GREG TUCKER The recent explosion of interest in AI has me thinking hard about how it may impact my business. As a CEO, I’m always looking down the road for potential headwinds and tailwinds that might impact our industry. My im-
mediate thought on AI is that the potential it has for eliminating differentiation is greater than the good it might provide. New AI technologies that are now available to everyone — ChatGPT, the new Microsoft Bing, Goo- gle’s Bard, Stable Diffusion, DALL•E 2, and others — will likely erode our critical thinking, our creativity, and our ability to differentiate.
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Greg Tucker
In the corrugated industry, which is comprised of approximately 500 independent companies, we compete and survive through differentiation — our products differ (not every brown box is the same), the services we offer, and how we go to market vary greatly. If we all use AI, we’ll risk los- ing what makes each of us unique. All Information From The Same Place We need differentiation to compete — it’s good for all of us in the cor- rugated industry. But how do we compete if we all depend on AI systems that get information from the same places to generate marketing con- tent, do product development, and determine business strategies? Will we all start to look the same? Will customers be able to understand why
one corrugated company — or any other type of business — differs from another? Only humans can be original, be creative, and differentiate. AI only differentiates when a human provides information that allows for that difference. But who gets to set the bias in the data? And who fact checks? Arbitrators Create Everything The recent rollouts of ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard have not gone quite as their creators expected them to. There have been some concerning results. People who have put them to the test, including official testers, journalists, and tech experts have been surprised by the amount of inac- curate, completely made-up information — and even aggression — these AI platforms have served up. An article in The Verge calls Microsoft’s AI chatbot an “emotionally manipulative liar.” Vanderbilt University had to apologize to students after using ChatGPT to write an “odd” email reflecting on a mass shooting at another university — and leaving the ChatGPT signature at the bottom of the email. And it seems some AI chatbots, like Bing and Sidney, have resorted to insults and threats towards the humans testing them. We cannot blame the technologies for these problems. They function on data that’s provided to them and how they are programmed to learn — both of which are likely to include human bias. All of it comes back to CONTINUED ON PAGE 14
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March 27, 2023
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