Is AI going to ruin the world? Experts & Entrepreneurs discuss…

0:00So Justine, how do you feel about the future of AI? as it stands? Well, broadly speaking, I'm absolutely blown away by AI and think it will be an extraordinarily transformative technology that will change everything. And it has the power to do tremendous good, but it also has the risk that it could do tremendous harm. So I'm sort of both awestruck but nervous. And I fear that regulators in particular are going to be way behind the curve. And that once again, big tech is going to be sort of making all the moves on this stuff and big tech is driven by profit. I don't think any of us, we may have thought in rosy times a few years ago, that was not the case.

0:58And there were other motives at hand like do no evil and all this kind of stuff but actually they're just big companies that have a profit motive and therefore i think um it is dangerous um to let them waltz untrammeled over this ai environment and and it's it's so i'm i'm a bit nervous about it justine you're suing tech giants uh over ai um what's at stake for mumsnet but what's at stake for for businesses in general in what's happening with AI right now? Yeah, okay. So we are pursuing a legal claim against open AI specifically. First in the UK, right? First in the UK, yeah, for copyright. Breach of copyright and various other kind of technical legal stuff that's around copyright.

1:48And this is because they have, we were aware that they have been crawling across our website and lifting the content and ingesting it into their models which is the most famous of which is ChatGPT. And that is against our terms and conditions and it's against UK copyright law. But they've been pretty out there as all the big tech AI companies have been in saying that they need to ingest the contents of the web to build their models and they don't feel they should have to pay for it. it's convenient yeah what a great line yeah um so so someone needs to really well they need to the the legal case needs to be proven because at the moment they're just riding rough roughshod over it and they're growing so fast they're raising so much money they're going as fast as they can they're just tying up any complainant in kind of legal knots um what's at stake i think is, I mean, we've all seen, and you go to Google now, you'll see the AI overview at the top if you put something into Google.

3:00What's at stake is that if they're allowed to just lift content that creators are making, and then they're allowed to put it into models that mean they can give the answers to the questions that people put into search or wherever, it means that people won't need to go to those websites which are creating the content. So ultimately, they will die, because obviously, the reason people create content is to get viewers and eyeballs so they can monetize them one way or another. So they will dry up. Ultimately, the large language models will... The irony is they need this content. So they really ought to find a way of paying for it, or at least licensing it in some way or at least creating some kind of value exchange.

3:49So at the moment, we all let Google scrape us, right? Because we know Google will drive traffic to us when we're listed in their search results. But with AI, you don't get any of that benefit. They're not acknowledging you. They're not driving traffic to you. They're not paying for anything, except for a few big publishers who I presume have threatened legal action, but we don't know what they're paying. And it's not a widespread ecosystem to pay for content. So it's existential, I think, to a lot of smaller publishers. In a funny kind of way, Mumsnet's in a better position than most because we offer more than just editorial content.

4:31It's really human interaction you come to Mumsnet for. But nonetheless, it really pissed me off when I discovered that they were crawling us We actually entered into licensing talks with them. And after some time thinking about it, we signed an NDA and we gave some data about what we had and stuff like that. They showed a lot of interest. They came back and said they were interested in less open sources of data, which I took to mean anything they couldn't steal. um so uh that really pissed me off um but i sorry just for clarity you have you were in negotiations with them to pay you yes to license our content yeah there are there are lots of good reasons why i think the ai models you know i've already said i think ai's a tremendous technology it's going to be huge breakthrough i mean you probably use it as much as i do already i i use it several times a day, chat, GPT.

5:31It's transformative, I think, in efficiency and all the rest of it. I think it's really important that female voices are reflected. There's a lot of examples of gender bias coming out of these models. So we are very interested in the models ingesting what I think is six billion words of incredibly high quality conversational data by women. Mumset's 98 % written by women. So there are lots of reasons why I would love them to ingest their models. And it's not just about money. It's about correcting gender bias. Sorry, to ingest our content. So yes, we were in conversation. We are also in conversation with a couple of others as well about that.

6:17But what I don't think they should be doing is just simply being able to, because they're big tech, you know, do what they like and steal content and ingest it and not pay for it. So you are a multi-company, multi-million dollar successful entrepreneur. Do you think that entrepreneurs can be born or made? I think entrepreneurs, we're all born very much with entrepreneurial spirit because entrepreneurial spirit is creativity and it's bringing together teams and being disruptive and being willing to fully express. So we're all born with that and and it's beaten out of us. We go to school and the schooling system was designed as a factory for factory workers.

6:55So ultimately it was designed to make you component labor. Component labor is to be refined, to fit into someone else's machine, and to be a good little moving part in someone else's big machine. And that was the whole schooling system. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, that's what we needed at the time. However, let's look at a few things. If I go to school and I come home and it says highly disruptive, that's bad thing. I go into the real world, highly disruptive, very good thing. Go to school, got somebody else to do the maths homework. That's cheating. Go my own company, got someone else to do maths homework.

7:30That's a CFO. I've hired a good team member. So we know that essentially the schooling system is getting rid of the things that make you a good entrepreneur. Don't be an attention seeker. you know don't don't seek attention well actually if you're going to build a business you need to get attention so basically class clown kind of thing just for trying to garner attention to itself totally and then plenty of people who are class clowns are now multi-millionaires because they were able to capture people's attention so i think everyone's born a variation of an entrepreneur we do need certain skills we do need to get those entrepreneurial skills unfortunately we have a schooling system that is a long-term schooling system designed to remove those disruptive schools if you're if you were an industrialist in in 1890 you do not want lots of entrepreneurial people running around workers you want workers and i think i think it's it's a remarkable thing but all of my entrepreneur friends all the people i know in the game are the c students yeah they are the c and d students like i was terrible at school i was awful the The thing that the deputy head called me in for sat down with my dad and said, your son is intellectually asleep.

8:43And my dad was like, I just I just think he's interested in other things that I was already selling things on the side. And so I feel like you're being trained for the wrong thing. And it's even worse now that we have AI. Yeah. Because ultimately the schooling system teaches you to be in a large language model that I prompt you and you give me a hallucinated response. right so essentially that's that's what i'm training you to be an llm but um what we need to do is train people to be good at prompting so rather than a kid learning how to deliver a hallucinated response they learn how to think through a problem where they can actually prompt the world and get back the responses and and work with a big picture context and then fill in the content through other sources so we at some point we're going to have to flip the whole education system on its head where we acknowledge in the same way we have calculators we don't need to you know we we're going to say well we have llms we can it's easy to prompt something getting a hallucinated response it's a 19th century education taught by 20th century teachers to 21st century kids yeah it's completely messed yes yeah yeah yeah totally don what is your perspective on uh ai managers then you've mentioned them a couple of times so what's your view on them I think there's a place in the marketplace in the market for them because I think there's such an enormous number of creators to starting out and some of them will go on to be brilliant creators as well then why not resource them as much as we can to start with and make sure that they get income to not have to give up and go back to their day job because there's that tipping point where you have if you're going to do anything worthwhile you're going to be dedicating you know 24 7 of your time to it um i think there's lots of things that an ai manager can't do and there are some things that an ai manager can do i think the risks are that we're going to have some there can be some terrible decisions made and awful contracts agreed on and all of those kind of things but um it'll be a means to an end as well so i think they have their place did you see uh obviously used to manage her um we're both you know investor in taller no okay so sorry different um obviously we both know her you used to manage her i'm an investor in her company did you see on intala sorry did you see grace beverly's new business the ai manager yes i did what do you think about that one in relation to other ones you've seen or what is their like sort of unique selling point about that versus others so i can't talk really knowledgeably about it because i haven't explored the platform or been uh you know i haven't explored the platform plus that is the only ai manager that i know of right okay yeah um and and so all my comments are based on hearing that watching grossest podcast launching it hearing the rest of the marketplace talk about it and give me their opinions on it and i've kind of taken taken uh i've taken on board all of that to form my own opinion of it, which is it's got a place in the market.

11:43There's lots of things it won't be able to do. There's lots of things that it's going to help with as well.