Leaders across all industries are facing pressure from their boards and CEOs to figure out where a generative AI solution can be implemented. The rationale is familiar: On the one hand, there’s excitement for capitalizing on new opportunities, and on the other, a fear of falling behind the competition. But amidst the push to innovate there is also well-founded anxiety. Samsung banned use of ChatGPT after employees loaded sensitive company data onto the platform that subsequently leaked. The well-documented tendency of AI to generate discriminatory outputs applies to generative AI, too. Meanwhile, generative AI companies are facing lawsuits: StableDiffusion, which generates images, faces a lawsuit from Getty Images, while Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI face down a class-action lawsuit.
Generative AI-nxiety
Leaders are feeling disoriented and concerned about the new technology. Here are four key risks to understand — and advice on how to address them.
August 14, 2023
HBR Staff; Mensent Photography/Getty Images; Midjourney
Summary.
The cacophony of alarms around generative AI has left leaders disoriented and concerned, particularly given that generative AI is available to everyone within their organizations, not just data scientists. There are at least four cross-industry risks that organizations need to get a handle on: the hallucination problem, the deliberation problem, the sleazy salesperson problem, and the problem of shared responsibility. Understanding these risks in detail can help companies plan how they want to address them.