Is AI Stealing Our Work? My Book, My Job, My Future 🤖 | Tech News

Speaker A: Think we have to be accountable and be agents of change, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence and the products that are being created and the problems that we're solving. Because if we don't step up and if we don't correct the mistakes that the world is making, they're going to leave us out of the history books, they're going to leave us out the documentation. They're going to give the success of a Sonia Barlow to a white woman with blonde hair. When I am of Pakistani British heritage, when I am, um, brown in skin color and look ethnic, they're going to give it to somebody else who doesn't even look and feel like me. This is Sonia Barlow, and welcome back to another episode of Tech that's got me thinking. Look, I have been scrolling the Internet, I have been attending events, I've been lurking behind the scenes just to understand what's going on in the world of work. I've recently been to a school and the kids are fearing that artificial intelligence is going to take over their jobs and they want to go back to university because there is stability. I have been to events where the discussions around are we foolproofing our skills? And most importantly, why are we not being hired? And then I'm going online and looking at the chatgpts of the world. Just get our identity and our race wrong. And now as an author, they are stealing our intellectual property. I mean, that's a lot to start with, but that's kind of what I want to talk about. This week has not been doom and gloom, but it has been eye opening. I've been reading some of the work that Reid Hoffman, co founder of LinkedIn, has said and he makes a really great point in this Guardian article. He said, I don't think it's AI proofing yourself, it is AI amplifying yourself. The important thing is to be engaging with AI and learning the tools. Young people have a real advantage because they're interested and tend to adopt new workplace technologies readily and can bring a skill set and a mindset to the workplace that can help workplace traffic transformation. I read that from the script itself because that is what he said and I absolutely agree. We know that by 2030, 70 million jobs are going to be displaced, but 90 million are going to be formed. So that's 20 million new jobs that we don't even know what they are, who, who's going to be taking them, what skills are going to be using. But we do know that we can be ahead of that curve. So if you're thinking of creating the skills that you require. You need to learn how to use AI to create efficiency and to be productive rather than focusing on AI, artificial intelligence taking over the work you're doing. Look, AI is going to make some work bits easier. You know, not everybody wants to do the admin and boring task. Not everybody wants to do the SWOT analysis to see what new business they should be starting. Not everybody wants to sense check their grammar, small things like that. But that doesn't mean that artificial intelligence is always right. It just means that the more data we input into the systems, the cleaner output will be. And so it'll be more, uh, it'll be factually more correct than what is available now. Reid Hoffman also makes a great point that in the future having artificial intelligence will be like having a mobile phone, right? So it is going to be everywhere. There is no doubt about it. We cannot go backwards. So what are we doing to build our skills Today? I went to the Allian School in Dulwich this week to talk to the students and I just took a step back and I was like, look, focus on your skills, focus on your talent. Think about what your ideal future of work lifestyle looks like and the tasks that you want to be doing and start learning and embracing some of those experiences and tasks in your day to day. Tell me how you're using artificial intelligence today as a young professional. Be that, uh, figuring out the algorithm on social media, all the way to um, creating prompts in tools, to doing your own research, to uh, you know, creating your own bots, whatever that might be. Ultimately we're in the day and age where everything is up for grabs and no one quite knows what they're doing unless they've been in the game for the last 30 years, which majority of us haven't. And so if we're starting from point zero, why not get ahead yourself? At the same time, please don't use AI to create a job applications. There was, um, a news article I read on the BBC and it was data from charity Jobs who conducted a survey and found out that nearly half of people who had applied for Jobs had used AI in the application. And trust me, as much as we think that people aren't clued on, they are. You can tell when somebody used a prompt. There's a certain dash, there's a certain, um, it's just not natural in terms of its tone. It doesn't quite make sense. We're not in a day and age where we want perfection, we want something to be progressive and we want to make mistakes. And AI is just way too perfect. As an employer, I for sure know when my team have used AI or when marketing agencies in the past have. Last year I actually employed a marketing agency for some copywriting. And, and I kid you not, I could tell straight away that they had used artificial intelligence to actually create the um, blogs. And you know, that was a lot of money for little work because you're looking for that eq, you're looking for someone's natural conversation style, you're looking for a few mistakes, you're looking for the little details that, ah, you know, aren't widely available on the Internet. Um, and so we had to, we had to part ways. But then as an employer that makes me feel really hesitant as to who's coming into your business. Uh, the BBC article rightfully has contributors who says, look, AI is a tool to aid. Remember I said in another video, it's your smart assistant, but it cannot be you and you're going to get caught out if you're telling people that you can do certain things and you can't when you start the job. Look, redundancies are on a high. Apparently fintech is the only industry in the UK that's actually hiring. Everybody else is just making a bunch of people redundant. And you know, not for good reason let's say. Obviously DNI budgets are being cut and artificial intelligence is, is making a lot of roles redundant. Um, and you know, companies are cutting nice to haves and unfortunately nice to haves on marketing and sales and DNI and you know, socials, let's say. But these are the roles that people kind of want to do in the future. And so you need to future proof your skill set. You need to think about what the next five to ten years look like and work backwards. You need to make sure that for every three things you're consuming online that's kind of frying your brain, you're consuming one thing that you're learning from and hopefully that's going to be this, that you are following the relevant hashtags and leaders in your industry. So you are constantly educating yourself and nourishing, um, your brain. You know, like building up knowledge nuggets so that when you are going to networking events or when you're going for job interviews or when you're speaking to colleagues, you can pluck something out of thin air and be like, oh, did you know that this happened? Or did you know that this was said? Or you know, what are your critical thoughts on this statement that was made in this news article? Or what Reef Hodman's Hoffman, or what Reid Hoffman said, or what Sonia said, or people are clued on. And also people are really critical of the world right now because so much is happening and so why give them something else to criticize? If you have the experience, if you are building the experience, if you want the experience, showcase that in a really human like touch and through a human like manner, because that's what's going to differentiate you from a robot. In other news, as an author, let's talk about the robots and what they are doing. So yesterday, today is Tuesday. On Monday, my social media comms were going crazy because people were tagging me to tell me that apparently companies like Meta have used authors books to train their AI. So if you don't already know, I am, um, the author of Unprepared to Entrepreneur. So the English version and then it got translated into Brazilian Portuguese. And it is one of the proudest things that I've ever achieved in my life to be able to write a book, 70,000 words, have seven different redrafts and then go out and take it into the world. It is genuinely a massive achievement. Right. So hopefully you can see them. But now we have found out that companies like Meta have pirated our books and are using it to train AI. I want to know how you feel. The reason I asked that is because a few years ago we found out that a lot of Google bloggers were losing their income and their traffic because their blogs and uh, writing available on the Internet was being used to train AI models. Where do you think that information on your AI tools comes from? Like a chat GPT or a grok? It comes from what is already available in the Internet or. And what we are pushing into the data sets. Right. And so they're scraping widely available information, but with books it's slightly different because we own the rights. This is what we have written and we've put it into a format where we can sell because that is what generates income. From my understanding. In Australia, a couple of authors actually filed court proceedings because they alleged that Mark Zuckerberg approved the use of Lib Gen Dataset, an online archive of books to train the company's AI models. Despite warnings from his AI executives that that this data set was and is to be pilot, the Atlantic has also published a data set where you can find out if your books have been pirated to train AI. I did it yesterday and mine has and so I've needed some time to process that because what does that mean for me as an Author? I don't quite know right now, look, I'm a small business owner, I'm a solo entrepreneur. Do I have the funds to go after these massive companies in the world? Possibly not. Can I pull together with other authors in a society? Absolutely. Am, um, I going to. Do I not understand what's happening? No, because there's a commercial brain, there's a tech brain, and then there's a customer brain, and then there's what is a right and wrong brain. And look, in the world of AI, how do we know what's right and wrong? Because those ethics and those regulation, those rules haven't quite been created. Yeah. Morally, I think it's wrong to pirate my book. I think it's wrong to pirate anyone's book. And, you know, by principle, as an example, I don't download this PDF set of free books that are available online and I make sure that I'm watching those YouTubes where people are, um, sounding out books that ultimately, that they are, they've been like, right, free, credited and so forth, so forth. So I've done the checks myself, but that's only because I've done the work to know that the work's being stolen. And then I found this really interesting article in the drum from a, from a writer that said. Was I ghosted after. Was I ghosted after a pitch? Do they use my idea to feed into AI? And it's so interesting, right? We are in this day and age where someone can send you a task, especially if you're applying for a job of any kind, um, and they can then feed it into AI tools and make it do the work for you without you getting the credit. Again, what can you do? What do we have? One, you can possibly ask for compensation beforehand, especially if you're pitching or going for work experience. Two, you can make sure that you watermark it or write confidentiality statements. But even then, we've seen Shutterstock recently have, uh, had their watermark feature taken away through Google's new Gemini features. Right. You can have a ethics document that you can share with other people. Uh, you can sign posts when something isn't happening properly and you can protest. I mean, there's so much that we can do. We just don't quite know where to start. And I think the starting point is possibly to take agency of what we are not only feeding into the systems, but also what we are purchasing from the systems and what we're consuming. And that brings me on to my final point. I am thinking of starting a magazine alongside everything Else I want to do maybe our first print magazine. We're thinking of launching the like minded, like Minded Females print magazine in 2025. And so I have been using AI tools like ChatGPT to understand not only what the magazine market looks like right now, but to create, to create look and feels of what a mag might look like. And so I've done this 36 hours with Sonia Barlow, which is a blog that I've written. I just put all of the data into chat GPT and I was like, you know, with this picture, show me what this might look like in a magazine article format on print paper. And look, I'm a brown woman. And despite the amount of information they have of me and despite the amount of images that I have on the Internet, and despite the fact that I literally put in an image into ChatGPT, it came back with this white woman with blonde hair. And I am not a white woman with blonde hair. But also I've made it a point to give it feedback. I have made it a point to put myself on the Internet for that reason that I want to be rightfully, um, represented, especially for all the other women of colour that want somebody to look and feel like them. But because in the data sets a name like Sonia Barlow leverages itself not to a Pakistani, British heritage by any means. And um, that's not right or wrong. That just is my name. It's my first form of identity. It is my identity. And so why would I be okay with somebody taking that away? Especially if it's a tech tool that we have the agencies to change now? I'm not going to say it's going to happen overnight, but I, it was something that's really frustrating and also quite familiar. Right. These tools are just amplifying, um, stereotypes and amplifying biases and, and, and just, you know, reminding you that you are not enough in the system or making you feel like you're not enough. And so that's one other reason why we have to control or let me reframe what I'm saying, that's one other reason why I think we have to be accountable and be agents of change, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence and the products that are being created and the problems that we're solving. Because if we don't step up and if we don't correct the mistakes that the world is making, they're going to leave us out of the history books, they're going to leave us out of the documentation. They're going to give the success of a Sonia Barlow to a white woman with blonde hair. When I am of Pakistani British heritage, when I am brown in skin colour and look ethnic, they're going to give it to somebody else who doesn't even look and feel like me. And imagine in 5, 10, 15, 50, 500 years what that's going to do for history. And I personally am not going to try and let that happen. So I will take as much agency as we can. And I guess that's what this, um, this discussion really was about is how are you taking agency of artificial intelligence? I've given you three different examples. One, skills, two, authors and three, the work that you're doing to correct the mistakes. M. I'm not talking high level start, you know, building LLM models or agents of AI or even learning how to code. I'm saying what are the simple things that we can be doing today? Can we be focusing on future proofing our skill set? Can we be in a position where we are purchasing items that already exist from authors, let's say written content, but also protesting when something is being pirated and not using these models and you know, standing up for others and ourselves included? And can we be going back to these AI tools to say, look, what you have put in terms of output, what you have outputted is factually wrong and incorrect and this is why, and this is what I need you to fix again. You are taking control, you are creating change. And these are the small things that as consumers I believe that we can do that we are doing our bit to create the systems that already do exist, but also to ensure that the future world, let's just, you know, Talk up to 2030, where we have 20 million new jobs, is going to be reflective of the communities that we actually live and the ideas that we have, um, and the ways that our brains work and the way that we look and feel and talk and think and just, you know, believe. Hopefully you've enjoyed this. This is our fourth one. So I'm very excited that people are showing up. I've achieved and received so many awesome comments from you all, especially on LinkedIn, that you've enjoyed our discussions and, um, that you know, 20 minutes and less is just a good time frame to have a conversation that you've learned something, which is really the, the primal concept of this. It's just about teaching myself, teaching others, sharing knowledge, building those networks and making sure that we can get confident in the future of work together. So on that note, please do like, subscribe, share, leave your comments, ask me any questions I really want to do an ask me anything type, um, video as well. And on that note, this is Sonia Barlow, the founder of the LMF network, author and presenter, saying thank you so much for tuning in to another conversation. Thank you.