On May 16th, 2023, I was invited to be a delegate to the US hosting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Human Resource Development Working Group and run a workshop on Digital Literacy as a Workforce Skill in Detroit. It was a great honor to be there, and the team made up of folks from Certiport and the Global Digital Literacy Council to run the event did an exceptional job.
One of my colleagues, who I admire due to their unflinching honesty, told me that my speech was the second best one that day. It was high praise, because clearly the talk of the day went to Ambassador Chris Lu, the U.S. Representative for UN Management and Reform. It was indeed a banger. He started with some solid statements about the changing world of work, included a great quote “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.” which I had heard before, but was surprised to learn that it was attributed to Detroit’s own mixed-bag historical figure Henry Ford. After inserting some nods to the administration’s goals for the conference, the Ambassador did a record scratch and confessed that everything he had said to that point had been written by ChatGPT.
After picking up the mic again, he went on to talk about how much generative AI will change work for so many more workers, especially those who thought “they had lifelong job security because they were engaged in highly-skilled and creative professions”. I agree with him completely, but the point I want to make is how Artificial Intelligence and generative AI will make it even more imperative that we teach digital literacy to all.
The Henry Ford quote Ambassador Lu used really stuck out for me. When he first said it, I was pretty sure that the quote hadn’t actually come from Henry Ford. I missed some of the Ambassador’s speech because I was obsessively Googling the source of the quote. Google and Bing (which is powered by ChatGPT) both said that the quote came from Ford, and sourced the reference to this attribution to some sketchy blogs. A more authoritative source, the Henry Ford Museum noted on their page that many sayings are mis-attributed to Ford and to rectify that, it lists lengthy list of notable quotations they know he said. Lu’s quote was not in that list.
One of the things that is taught within the subject of digital literacy is how to assess the validity of online information. Google and Bing found multiple sources that attribute it to Ford, but the source of record, a web site that focuses on the history of Ford and is committed to accuracy was silent on this specific quote. Personally, I would not have attributed the quote to Ford. When I asked the Ambassador about it at the Tuesday night reception, he admitted that he had no idea whether Ford had said it or not. His point was about ChatGPT and the impact it will have on work, and for his purpose he made the point extremely well.
One of the biggest criticisms against generative AI is that the algorithm seems to just make stuff up. The fine folks from Silicon Valley admit it and call them “hallucinations”, which is really a public relations spin on the term “false information”.
Recently Certiport built a foundation level program on artificial intelligence. It is part of Certiport’s IT Specialist portfolio. I showed the program to folks at the company SAS who run their education programming. I was hoping they would endorse Certiport’s Databases and Data Analytics programs, which they kindly did, but they took a step further and said they were also interested in supporting Certiport’s AI program. Their reasoning provided great insight. SAS is a database company and one of the main challenges for anyone working with data is to ensure that the data is clean, accurate and valid. If you want to have a useful operatable AI, the data you feed into the algorithm is key. SAS is good at helping their customers do this and the advent of AI makes the need for what they do even more important.
ChatGPT uses the open internet as its input. Those of you who are digitally literate and are paying attention know that the open internet is flawed when it comes to accurate information. There is a lot of false stuff out there that exists due to multiple reasons. Web sites exist to serve purposes, to sell, to persuade, to make people look important. Sometimes having accurate information clashes with the intended purpose of the web site developer. Sometimes, like with the case of the Ambassador, the accuracy of the information is appropriately irrelevant to the point he wanted to make. No matter the intent of the author, Generative AI algorithms pull it all in. This leads to a lot of garbage going into the ChatGPT algorithm which causes the so-called AI hallucinations.
Posting this almost two weeks after the event, I redid the search, asking who said this quote. This time, Bing responded that the quote is from Henry Ford, because Christopher Lu, the US Ambassador to the United Nations used it in a speech at the Asia Pacific Economic Council Meeting in May of 2023.
Using the credibility of the Ambassador, who was simply quoting ChatGPT, to bolster a false conclusion is a perfect example of the automated daisy chain of navel gazing that is the Internet. False information, depending on the context, can be cute, funny, or meaningless. It can also be extremely problematic, divisive and even deadly. A sad sack of a lawyer is facing sanctions for submitting an affidavit to a court case which was generated by ChatGPT and hallucinated six internal citations. The lawyer had no idea that ChatGPT could generate false content.
I agree with Ambassador Lu that the advent of generative AI can be very exciting, really disturbing or both. How it plays out is going to depend entirely on how well our populations are ready for this next iteration of disruption. Our past approach to disruptive technology was to simply expect that people would figure it out on their own. That didn’t always work out so well. I’m hoping that this time, we can take a more proactive approach to ensuring people are digitally literate and ready for the technological future that is coming quickly.
It’s more imperative than ever that everyone takes the steps and learns to be digitally literate.
