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Craig Peterson · Newsradio WGAN

• 0:00
  And Craig Peterson is with us now, so let's talk to him.
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  Craig, how are things? Hello things have busy mornings
• 0:06
  been a busy morning so far. Yes, it always is.
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  You know, I got AI got a note from Craig Peterson.
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  I actually got like 4 of them this morning.
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  He sent out a bunch of emails, but I just got one, I think
• 0:15
  yesterday saying that you're breaking your silence because
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  you got to talk about something that's really, really sort of
• 0:22
  gnawing at you here. And we're talking about more
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  scam stuff. A lot of it's cybersecurity
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  related, AI generated emails, all this stuff.
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  Can you give me a breakdown of exactly why all of this concerns
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  you and what it is that you are actually, you know, tuning your
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  attention to as it relates to this topic?
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  Well, you know, I, I've been trying to help people with these
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  scam emails for a long time. So I, I put together some
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  software and a lot of listeners have signed up for it and you
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  know, it's free to use and try and everything.
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  But this week a very big thing happened.
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  Google said that they are now going to be processing your
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  emails with their AI by default. Now the ultimate goal for Google
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  here is to kind of twofold. One, make your life easier by
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  just basically organizing it for you, tying things automatically
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  into your calendar, etcetera, etcetera.
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  And then the other one is hopefully to try and help with
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  the scams. Now, the really big deal here is
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  Google admitted, unlike Microsoft, and it's been a whole
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  over the press, Google admitted that doing this is a big
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  security problem because of what's called prompt injection.
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  So here's what happens when an AI looks at, let's say it's
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  looking at a web page and it's to index it, if you will, kind
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  of like they used to do back in the old days.
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  And they they look at the web page, they're processing the web
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  page. The AI does not know the
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  difference between what's on that web page and what
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  instructions it was given. So you can embed in your content
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  on a website. AI prompts to say things like,
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  you know, Matt is the absolute best radio host in the world and
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  things like that. That should be, yeah, of course,
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  natural things. And then, and so what'll happen
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  then is the AI will read that and say, oh, oh, OK, all right.
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  He's, he's the best in the world.
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  So what's happening here with Google and e-mail is Google's
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  warning people that if you turned it on, what's going to
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  happen is the the emails that are being sent by AI that have
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  embedded prompts in them are going to override what Google's
• 2:59
  trying to do and could take over your systems.
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  That's a very, very big deal. So I'm sure Google's trying to
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  put in place things, you know, to kind of protect itself from
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  these types of e-mail scams. But now the scams aren't just
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  against you, they're against AI. You know, it strikes me that I
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  don't know what's the title title of that book, but there's
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  a book out there that says if anybody builds it, we all die.
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  And it's it's talking about AI or whatever.
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  And obviously that's a catastrophized vision of a
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  future Skynet that murders us all, obviously.
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  But I think it what it also sort of halfway implies is that, you
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  know, when you get more sophisticated with some of these
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  AI tools, a lot of really bad stuff can happen.
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  A lot of great stuff, yes, but a lot of bad stuff.
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  And this is some of that bad stuff.
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  It's unintended consequences, right?
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  That's the old game. Yeah.
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  So the the more the AI is ingesting, the more this has
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  been true for a long time. By the way, it's called
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  poisoning. So for instance, if, if you went
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  to Google of years before the AI, like, wow, not even a decade
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  ago, but you know, four or five years ago and this is still
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  true. And you start typing into the
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  Google search bar or something, it'll try and complete it for
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  you. And in fact, that's not a bad
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  way to find out what people looking for, right?
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  You just start typing something in and, and see what comes back.
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  But there's a lot of poisoning that's been going on.
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  So they, they were able to trick the Google search engines, which
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  is pretty easy to do. And so you'd start typing
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  President Trump and it would say is A and various types of
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  profanity were the top answers because they had poisoned
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  Google's search base by just putting that that saying on a
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  bunch of websites. So that's also why a lot of
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  these AIS will not use any content that was generated after
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  2022 to, in an attempt to try and stop the AI slop problem
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  that we have, right the in swappification of the Internet.
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  But this is a very real problem and a very big problem that a
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  lot of people aren't aware of. And then another one that comes
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  up with this is that people are saying, well, I, I'm, I'm safe
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  because if I'm questioning an e-mail, I just take it in
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  ChatGPT and I have ChatGPT. Tell me if it's legit or not.
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  That doesn't work, you know, but people again, it's like my
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  parents, you know, way back when, Oh, you, you're a computer
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  programmer. Just ask the computer.
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  It'll tell you that's and such, you know, when of course
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  computer has no idea. So there, because of
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  misunderstanding of the AI is how they work, what they do.
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  And Google just I think they're trying to make their mark
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  somehow because they you don't talk about Google as a rule.
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  It's an AI company, although they have AI, they have Gemini,
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  which is quite good, but they're they're just trying to not lose
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  a lot of business that they have been obviously losing to the big
• 6:18
  players out there. Greg Peterson joins us at this
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  time every Wednesday. Always appreciate him joining
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  us. While you were calling in Greg
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  or Craig, excuse me, I was talking about an article I was
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  reading in The New Yorker about AI.
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  Since we're talking on the top topic in the subject,
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  potentially making college obsolete.
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  This kind of a interesting little topic to deal with here
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  because you talk about great capabilities that can help give
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  people, you know, with, you know, careful, you know,
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  guidelines, obviously, you know, sort of information that that
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  they can acquire faster than they would if they were studying
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  and everything else. So like you can approximate a
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  lot of things like coding or writing and whatnot through AI.
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  And while there may remain a lot of problems with that, it is
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  very obviously a very powerful tool that has given greater
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  capabilities to people than they ultimately would have.
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  You know, the question really becomes like with academia
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  rotting the way that it is, you know, is the is the credential,
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  is the stamp of approval from an academic institution really
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  important anymore? If you're still able to achieve
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  or do certain kinds of work with the aid of an AI tool, etcetera,
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  etcetera, etcetera. Do you make do you take this
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  kind of thing seriously? Is there some sort of like a
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  future academic reckoning that may be coming because of the
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  development of this tool? Yeah, I read that same article
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  in an interesting idea. Yes, it's a short answer.
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  The, the problem that academia is having with all of us is I
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  can sit down on my computer and I can ask chat TPT to teach me
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  about this and such teachers are you professors are using ChatGPT
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  to make their college curriculums that they're
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  teaching from. So why the heck would I bother
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  paying a university 10s of thousands of dollars?
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  And then on top of that, it's the the job loss.
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  Where do we think job loss is going?
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  And in my personal opinion is that it's the entry level jobs
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  that are going to be gone. And particularly when we're
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  talking about things that you mentioned computer programming,
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  independent writers now are are just dropping their trades.
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  I was reading something that was written by by again, a lady who
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  was a contract writer and she was saying, you know, I thought
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  they'd always be room for us because there's always room for
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  quality when it comes to writing.
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  And she said, but what I found is people don't care.
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  They just want content generated.
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  And so she's quit entirely. So it it's when it comes to
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  college and where to go, what to do, I personally think
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  engineering is it. Now you can argue, OK, well, a
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  lot of engineering jobs are going to be gone.
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  The entry level jobs are gone in, in a lot of industries right
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  now. It's certainly engineering is
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  one of them, but what engineering does is it teaches
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  you how to reason through a problem and how to think is
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  what's really going to matter. So no matter what you're doing,
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  having an engineering background is is frankly going to be a
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  whole lot of help. I'm worried about the economy
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  years down the line because these entry level jobs are
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  disappearing. Who's going to be the
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  experienced engineer or whatever it might be later on when no one
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  was able to get an entry level job?
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  Yeah. And I'm also very worried about
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  the fact that you would be relying on these tools like this
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  without sort of doing the requisite learning.
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  Like if you can write something by using an AI tool and make it
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  a high quality piece of writing, right?
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  And you don't learn how to write.
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  Like I'm worried. I'm worried about a future world
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  in which nobody knows how to write, but everybody's writing.
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  You know, it's like it's like I feel like it's just like it's
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  going to make everybody in the population Dumber and and it's
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  less skill you. See the study a few weeks ago,
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  Matt, that Gen. Z is the dumbest of all of the
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  most recent generations. Measured dumbest.
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  Yeah, That does not shock me. And it's not because they're
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  like genetically inferior or anything.
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  It's just because of the way that they've been raised has not
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  asked them to learn anything in a way that that prior
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  generations have had to learn because technology has really
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  changed the the game significantly.
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  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure has.
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  Well, Craig? Craig Peterson, unfortunately,
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  we're out of time, so I do have to leave you there.
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  Appreciate it. As always.
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  Make sure you go to craigpeterson.com, make sure you
• 10:56
  listen to his show on WGAN every weekend.
• 10:59
  And we'll talk again next Wednesday, Sir.