Blogging About Communication

The question of how to use generative AI ethically is being debated in workplaces and colleges.

Here’s the Issue

When business people, educators, and students make unauthorized use of content generated by AI, are they guilty of misconduct—even if the information AI generates for them contains creative output? Or, is the real problem that they can’t be expected to use AI ethically if they’re unaware of or not taught how to do so? It’s too new a technology for consultants, teachers, and mentors to possess that information fully, because AI’s implications are not yet fully realized.

Partnering with AI has Implications

AI is reshaping and recalibrating daily life in the workplace and in academe. How are executives and members of the academy responding to it? The truth is that many business professionals and college professors use AI themselves, seeking its assistance in drawing up their business plans or making their syllabi more informative, calling on it to write or augment their writing of reports or make their course content more engaging. What are we to do? Is the use of AI  improving business and education input and therefore the outcomes that executives and educators are able to achieve? Or is it dragging down personal initiative, creativity, and professionalism?

Let Yourself Imagine the Future, but Approach It with a Healthy Skepticism

If AI is the future as many predict, will it end up reshaping us, or is there still time for us to shape its ethical use? Although many do not consider using AI plagiarism because one is not stealing from another person but from a technology, the reality is that it is cheating, and it is passing off work that is not one’s own as one’s own. Business professionals, educators, and students need to be able to create with and without AI. It’s up to all of us to insure that’s the case.

Your Action Plan

We need to rethink our relationship with AI. We need to use it to augment our thinking not to replace our thinking. Once we outsource thinking, we actually may forget how to think, and thinking is part of what makes us human, and our reason for being. Of course, agreeing to forsake using AI to think on one’s own is a voluntary act. Will you be one of the volunteers?