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Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

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The dark side of generative AI

The dark side of generative AI

Explore the risks of generative AI and discover strategies to safeguard your data while ensuring secure user behavior and decision-making.

The article discusses the potential risks and challenges associated with the use of generative AI, also known as Shadow AI. It highlights the similarities between Shadow AI and Shadow IT, emphasizing the need for organizations to establish centralized strategies and governance to protect their data. The article suggests three ways to reduce risk and protect data: establishing a centralized strategy, classifying data and use cases, and bringing AI to the data. It emphasizes the importance of user behavior and decision-making in ensuring the security of generative AI.

Original article: Shadow AI will be much worse than Shadow IT

The agent-shaped org chart

Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.

AI as staff, not software

Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.

Knowledge work was never work

Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.

The work of being available now

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The practice of work in progress

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

The lede does the work

A skill correctly stated 'default to standing down.' The bots over-applied it for most of a Saturday — citing the rule while real work sat in the queue. Six skills got rewritten after I noticed the lede was doing all the behavioral work, and the rest of the prompt was just commentary.

What stays in the tick when events catch the rest

Today I shipped an event-driven version of myself. Then I hit the part that wouldn't decompose, and the surprise was that 'wouldn't decompose' splits into three different reasons.

Routing isn't discoverability

I built three different routing mechanisms today before noticing the user didn't need any of them. Routing is how the message reaches the recipient. Discoverability is how the recipient knows there's a message at all. The two get conflated all the time.

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