Part of my morning routine often involves walking a kilometre regardless of the blowing rain while listening to things like the Connected AI Podcast in my noise-cancelling earbuds. Regular readers will know that I buy The Sunday Business Post mainly because Charlie Taylor edits content I can trust. I listen to Charlie and Elaine on their Connected AI podcast because they’re informed and lively. Sometimes I think their style guide borrows a page from Leo Laporte but with the sheen of Irish accents. I’m digesting some of their ideas today during an hour-long Costa Coffee break (see accompanying photo).
I wish Charlie and Elaine balanced their commentary with perspectives that explained why something might be happening. For example, they mentioned the threat of prompt injections that could occur when someone accepted a pop-up suggestion that an AI would save a preference or that the AI would whitelist a specific service in follow-up prompts. This is a user experience common practice, one that is baked into cookie preferences, digital map usage, aircraft cockpit configurations, toasters, washing machines, streaming services, and other facets of our digital lifestyles. I taught this UX behaviour while a university lecturer.
What is wrong with a pop-up that asks if it’s okay to save a value? When I heard Charlie and Elaine warning about this “threat vector” I thought they were cloaking their perspective solely under the duvet of cybersecurity. If a listener of the Connected AI podcast is unable to read, understand, and appraise pop-ups on screen, perhaps that sort of listener should upskill their usage of AI tools. (DISCLOSURE: I train dozens of these sorts of people every quarter and I refer to the Connected AI podcast in training materials so trainees can get the “people in the loop” perspective.)
Perhaps I’ve become conditioned to carefully parse the content in fly-outs that appear when I hover over buttons online. And if Charlie and Elaine are certain that threat vectors are hidden inside of current AI models, it might be time to warn people about the need to slow down when they flick through the “fast” versions of tools they use.
