Personalized strategy – without the expensive fees! My experience of being impersonated by an AI bot

PERSONALIZED STRATEGY – without the expensive fees! My experience of being impersonated by an AI bot. Rita McGrath Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks

INTRODUCTION Among the unintended consequences of AI applications built with few guardrails is that conventional views of what is intellectual property are upended – I found out the hard way!

Well, that was a surprise!

An acquaintance contacted me on LinkedIn about something unrelated, and then congratulated me for being forward-thinking enough to work with an AI bot associated with the Board of Innovation. “Say what?” thought I. I know of the Board of Innovation, but I’ve never worked with them or done any joint projects. So I thought I’d check it out.

RON’S POST Here’s what he said: When AI goes way too far: The Board of Innovation has published a ChatGPT bot that purports to give advice as Rita McGrath, who has never given permission for them to use her name, much less pose as anything close to the strategy advice she would give. This is theft of a globally recognized strategic thinker's name and reputation! It gets worse when you use the "Rita McGrath" bot; the advice it gave me used the Horizons framework, a framework that Rita has never promoted and didn't develop! This nonsense and outright theft must be called out and stopped! BTW, they have a convenient link at the bottom of the "chat" asking the user to connect with the Board of Innovation if they need strategy advice - lovely!

The Board’s response I did get a note back from the Board, who said “The AI toolbox for innovators was one of the team's early experiments with building a skin over the OpenAI API.” They did take it down and now you get a 404 message when you try to go to that page, which was here: https://ai.boardofinnovation.com/strat egic-advice-ai

HOOVERING UP THE HARD WORK OF OTHERS

This is just one example – and a very modest one, with few serious consequences that I know of – of how AI with no rules and guardrails can get organizations into hot water. A far more consequential issue is raised by William D. Cohan, writing in the Washington Post.

As he says, “The other day someone sent me the searchable database published

by Atlantic magazine of more than 191,000 e-books that have been used to train the generative AI systems being developed by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. It turns out that four of my seven books are in the data set, called Books3. Whoa.

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