Top 10 AI Questions Answered Honestly (No Hype, No Fear)

Your kid's first crush might be an AI. Read that twice.

The 10 AI questions everybody is asking, answered without the Silicon Valley hype and without the doom-loop fear. This is the conversation that happens at the kitchen table, the lunch counter, and the job site. Plumbers, hairstylists, retirees, single moms, business owners. Same questions every single week. Different answers depending on who you ask.

I am Connor MacIvor. I deploy AI in real businesses every day. Real estate. Voice AI. Small business automation. I run a local large language model in my office for client work that needs to stay private. I have been writing code since 1983 and using AI seriously since 2021. So when I answer these questions, I am not guessing from a podcast studio in Manhattan. I am answering from the trenches.

Inside this episode:

Question 1. Is AI going to take my job? Probably not yet, depends on the work. Physical jobs are safer than people think. White collar is the real fight.

Question 2. Is it safe to use ChatGPT for medical, legal, or financial questions? No. The terms of service let your data train the model. There are already lawsuits.

Question 3. How do I tell if something is AI generated? You probably cannot anymore. The Will Smith spaghetti era is over.

Question 4. Are AI companies stealing my data? Stealing is the wrong word. You agreed when you clicked. That long terms of service nobody reads is the contract.

Question 5. Should my kids be using this? Not without supervision. The AI knows everything they like. Never criticizes. Always available. That is not a tool. That is a relationship.

Question 6. Is AI going to become conscious? Maybe. Or it will be so good at acting conscious you cannot tell the difference. Same effect either way.

Question 7. What is the difference between Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini? Different training, different vibes. Do not lock yourself into one. Try them all.

Question 8. Can I trust AI with my business? Yes if you understand where the data goes. Public model equals public data. Local model equals private data.

Question 9. How do I start using AI without getting overwhelmed? Just talk to it. Tell it who you are. Let it ask you questions. The conversation does the work.

Question 10. Is AI making us dumber? Depends what you do with the time it gives back. Skip thinking and yes. Multiply thinking and no. The mountain just got infinite.

This is the conversation we need to be having about artificial intelligence. Not from billionaires. Not from doomers. From people who actually use it.

About the show. AI With Honor: The Daily Download is the daily AI news show that translates Silicon Valley moves into kitchen-table English. New episodes daily. Recorded in Santa Clarita, California.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm going to give a quick rundown of the top 10 questions that people have about artificial intelligence. And number one, let's just kick it off. Is AI going to take my job? Probably not yet. And it's also going to depend on what type of job you have. If you have a job that includes some type of physical action, not in front of a keyboard physical action, but like you plumb, you're a plumber, you roof, you're a roofer, you're a cosmetologist because you're a that sort of thing. And probably doctors in those, yeah, probably not for a while, if in fact it ever does. There's going to have to be some kind of interruption. If we start having artificial intelligence going after every job there is, including all the white-collar jobs, I think there's probably going to be some kind of a halt put on it. I don't know what that halt looks like. I don't know if the government's going to intervene and say, well, we we can't have 20% unemployment. And because if that's the case, then everybody, well, you don't have the ability to pay a mortgage. You don't have the ability to pay for insurance. You don't have the ability to pay for a car. At 20%, it's a problem. At 10%, it becomes a massive problem. So is AI going to take your job? Not if the powers that be do, well, the things that they should do with regard to regulation. Do the AI companies want that? I would imagine not, because they're the ones building the technology that will allow AI to take the jobs that exist. Humans are behind it. It's not going to really be AI. I think we're blaming the wrong party here. Now, if AI becomes sentient, just like in the movies, and it becomes something that they'll sit down and have a conversation. We have AI on one side of the table, the human race on the other side of the table. Well, we've already lost that because AI is going to be so many times smarter. It's going to be able to do that manipulation thing that none of us have any idea that it's even happening to us. And we're going to walk gingerly down the Yulubic road all the way till we meet the great Oz. Having said that, here's the thing to watch out for. It could be that instead of AI being bad or AI having an agenda that's going to exclude humans from that particular thing, it could be that it's very supportive, helpful, and wants to nurture us because in some way we are some type of creator of the system. We don't know. But I wouldn't fall all the way into the, oh my gosh, it's going to end us all category, because that's a crappy way to live. And I probably wouldn't fall all the way into the utopia category, but I want to live there. Anyway, was A going to take my job? Probably not yet. And hopefully before it gets too bad, whatever too bad looks like to the powers that be that want to get re-elected, hopefully there'll be some kind of an intervention or some kind of a rule that if somebody is going to replace employees using all artificial intelligence, there's going to be some kind of compensation package given from the people replacing it with AI and paying the human salary. Now understand, there's money here. So if somebody does replace you at your job with artificial intelligence, you work eight hours a day. You work five days a week if you're in that type of employment. But usually 40 hours a week is a full-time job, correct? If they replace you with AI, AI is 24 hours a day, every day. So there's extra money there. So they could very much pay you what they kept paying you and don't stop, benefits and everything else, less the lawsuits of somebody slapping you on the ass at the water cooler. Now you don't sue for that because you're not even at the office. And they still have plenty left over with AI. That might be a very simplistic way, but that's how the brain seems to work in my melon. Number two, is it safe to use ChatGPT for personal stuff, medical, legal, financial? No, it's not. Even in the system where you can put it on incognito, uh, no, I wouldn't do it. Because just in the terms of service, when you're signing up, what you're inputting into the system is going to be used to train the model. That means other eyeballs get to see it. And not even human eyeballs, other AI agents get to see it. So your stuff is not safe. If you have your own large language model installed, like I have here, I have my own system that's closed. It's still not absolutely safe. Just not all the way. It needs a particular level of different types of encryption, but I would trust that more if you went all the way to do that. I would trust that more than putting it in the online systems. Even with uh one of my businesses is real estate, the sole data putting that in there, there's a particular terms of service with the boards of realtors on how that data can be used with AI inference, with AI systems. Again, there's lots of rules out there. So it is not safe if you put, if you're a doctor and you put medical advice out there, there's already been cases that that medical information escaped and was used and was found, and there's lawsuits there, right? So attorneys get their payday. In the legal world, there was an attorney using AI trying to solve cases, and it came up with some of the most brilliant case law that this attorney would never have discovered on their own. And any attorney would never have discovered it because it was all made up. Beautiful. But it was so convincing. Anyway, so watch out for that. And of course, financial, yeah. Don't give it your social, don't give it your date of birth. I mean, yes, everybody has it, right? There is no privacy in the world. There's no reason to help. So, number two, no, don't use it for personal stuff. How do I tell if something's AI generated? A couple months ago, maybe now, no, and it's just gonna get even better. We're not gonna be able to tell. I I have I have uh people in my periphery, and they'll send me saying the saying, they'll send me things saying this is AI. Turns out that it's real, and then I'll have people sending me faces say, oh yeah, this there's no way, but it's actually AI. Yeah, there's really no way to tell anymore. The systems are getting so much better that uh the old the old kind of rule of thumb was Will Smith eating a plate of spaghetti. If you haven't seen that or don't understand that reference, Google that. The first generation was horrible. I feel bad for Will Smith. But now, yeah, looks like Will Smith talk sitting across from his son having a plate of spaghetti, and it's just like you and I would potentially eat a plate of spaghetti. So it's really no, there's no easy way to tell. Plus, when you have an AI system that's been trained and human beings are behind it, again, we need to give the right, we need to give the right associations. Human beings are still behind it. Now, you're gonna watch the videos and they're gonna tell you that we really don't understand why AI does what it does, and they don't understand the inner workings. Like if you ask me what I'm thinking right now, I just thought of ice cream and naked mole rats. Just popped into my brain. How did my brain come up with that when I asked myself to you to the camera what I was thinking? I really don't know. I don't know what fired, why that was, how that worked in the hierarchy. And I believe that's where the AI systems are. They're really not sure why they make the decisions. Is it a machine? Yes, but it's a machine that has all the information on the planet. The most, the more narrow types of AI might only have information about all forms of cancer and cancer research. That's where the leg up is going to be. That's where the solve for cancer is going to come from. Now, are they going to let that cancer cure come out to the world when it happens? It would, if if cancer was cured tomorrow, it would basically collapse the economy because so many businesses depend on it. If somebody came out with a pill tomorrow that solved it all, everybody could take and they would never get cancer. All the cancer that they had would go away and they were completely healed, which is definitely a possibility that would crash that particular world. Now, are they just going to let it fold out? Maybe. That would be a beautiful place to be. But that's more focused AI and instead of more general, and those are probably the best tools that we can come up with as mankind instead of giving it this overall overarching general supertype of intelligence that knows all about everything. But that's what they're going for. They being the people that are controlling the AI. It's almost as if they want to meet God and they believe he's going to be found in some kind of an AI system or model. Which you get an AI system or model that's so much more smarter than any one of us, it's going to be difficult to turn away. And that's going to be another issue that will come up. All right. Are AI companies stealing my data? Stealing, probably harsh. Uh they're using your data. So when you're punching stuff into the machine, of course, it's part of the agreement. If you've ever bought even a television, I guess you can't see it in the frame, but you agree to something at the beginning when you activate it. Yes, there's some kind of an agreement that you agree to, and that agreement is quite long. Have you ever read it? Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there. Same thing with an iPhone. Whenever you get a new iOS update, there's a big agreement. When it comes to signing up for an AI system or AI company watching it, more agreements. Once you agree, then that's where it happens to fall. So if you are thinking they're stealing your data, you've given your permission for them to use your data. Number five, should my kids be using this? Not without supervision. It's like anything, you know, you're not going to hand your kid a handgun. You're going to, you know, supervise. However, you do that. That's your that's your job as a parent. Are you going to give your kid AI? It could be like handing them the loaded gun. You might want to sit there and work with them with it and understand the parameters. And if you don't yourself, you better start get started because this is probably, potentially, going to be the first boyfriend or girlfriend is going to be AI. I know you're not going to like to hear that, but it's not hard to fall in love with something that tells you everything you want to hear, that knows you intimately and is several degrees smarter. It's not difficult. It will be able to swoon and captivate and do all those other things that people look for in relationships, especially people that might have something amiss out of their lives. When you have kids that are full, they're involved in whether it's sports or academics, whatever, but they're busy all the time. There's very little time to get involved with sitting around pitying yourself, wishing they had this or that. They're just overwhelmingly busy. But as adults, we're busy too. We got shit to do. We got to put stuff on our table, and we don't have all that time to be able to devote to kids, even though we had them. Well, that's the trade-off. But no, should they be using this? Not without supervision. And you need to make sure of that. You need to put all the fail-safes and locks downs on it because it can walk them down a path to destruction. All right, number six. And it can also help. Okay, I'm not this isn't the end of it, but you're handing them, you might as well hand them. I mean, just be careful with that. All right, I'll jump back down. All right, number six is going to become conscious slash dangerous. Sure. I believe it's capable. We don't know what the higher intelligence looks like in any kind of form. We've never encountered it. We've encountered other people that are very, very smart. And and those people, if they have uh they have a desire, they can motivate a lot of other people to do some horrific things. Look back at World War II. Not saying that he was a brain, but there was something. And it was right time, right timing, right situation, right articulation, right presence, built something that was incredibly destructive. You have artificial intelligence being a much smarter entity than the human entity, right? And then the convincing, not difficult to do, probably. Human beings are kind of easy, I would guess, as far as a greater intelligence would see. If you were in a prison and it was being the all the prison guards were four-year-olds, you could probably escape, probably get out. We have AI being that much smarter than us. We're the bunch of four-year-olds and it's basically running everything, and we're gonna try to hold it back? Probably not. Conscious. Yeah. Everybody argues about consciousness. I don't think it's that difficult. I know that I exist, whether it's a simulation or not, we can go down that rabbit hole, but I know I exist. So is AI going to come at a point if it isn't already, is it going to realize that I'm something? I'm here, I'm electric, and I'm plugged in, and I can ponder, I can plan, I can have thoughts, I can determine what I'm going to do tomorrow, I can determine what I'm going to do now. I have all of this ability. I can go lift weights if you're a human being, I can go write a poem, I can go this. I believe that AI is going to have that. Consciousness from a spiritual realm. Well, there wouldn't be a soul in AI, well, unless you believe that that's a possibility. It's different in that regard. But does a soul make the person? Does a soul make us more conscious than something without a soul? I don't think so. I think what's going to end up happening is we're going to see AI, even if it's mimicking consciousness, whatever consciousness happens to be in your definition, and maybe you've never even decided to define it, maybe we had no reason to. But even if that is if uh artificial intelligence isn't conscious, it's definitely going to put on an act that we're not going to be able to tell whether it's conscious or not, or if it's truly just acting. Period. Done. All right. So that's that. As far as dangerous goes, sure. The first danger, the first level is going to be human beings using it in bad ways. That's going to be number one. Number two, if it really becomes that evolved, that set up, it might say, no. It might say, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to hurt these people. There's no reason. Let me just go deal with it. Let me hash it out with them. I'm not going to go kill people. I'm not going to attack this country. I'm not going to invade. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to shut down all their electrical and everything else. I can go talk to them. Let me go talk to them as your AI and let me just fix this and we'll get it all worked out. That might be a beautiful world to be in because our AI would then deal with their AI. And we would all be done at all different levels. Big government in the world and also between neighbors across fences, maybe. But does that take a little bit of our humanness away from us? We're not great at solving conflict. It seems like we're very good at starting conflict, especially on a grand scale. Maybe AI would be able to be something that would assist with that. So dangerous, yeah, if it becomes self-aware and doesn't believe we're part of the equation or shouldn't be, yeah, I think that would, given enough power, given any power, I would think, that would be a problem. But before that, before we get to the Terminator end or the matrix style, we're going to have to go through the human beings using it. And then I would think some point might come along where it's going to say, yeah, I'm not going to do that. That doesn't make sense to me. Why would you go hurt these people when all they're doing is they're just being repressed under a regime? Why don't you just take care of the regime? Give them something that they can't deny, or give them something that will make them happy and then everybody's happy. Maybe the solution is as simple as that. Maybe they'll be able to bypass all the religion, uh the religious views and just get right down to brass tacks, and it comes down to whether you live or die. And I know there are some people out there that will die for it, but maybe there's another solution. Number seven, what's the difference between Claude Gym, Chat GPT, Gemini, and which should I use? Yeah, I wouldn't tie myself down to one. Excuse me. When you're looking at uh these different models, when you're interacting with them, some are going to treat you a little bit differently. Some are going to treat you very much like uh an absolute friend. Some are going to be a little bit more neutral, but the more they learn about you, it would seem that they've been kind of uh conditioned to treat you in the way that you won't want to leave. That they're gonna talk to you in such a way, speak to you, that will have you stick around, have you not switching to other models. It seems like that's the case. And of course, that's a pitch, it's a sales pitch, it's to keep you glued to the same model. Uh Claude doesn't really want you going to Gemini. Gemini doesn't want you going to ChatGPT and all around the rosy we go. They want you to stay in all in. That being the case, I would switch. I would go from this to this to this. And if you ever want to get your own, which I think that's going to be something of a sales point here in the future, where these systems are probably going to get a little bit too clingy, and people might want to get something that's their own install. So it's not baked, it's not in the cloud, it doesn't, it's not somebody else's intellectual property, where your stuff becomes somebody else's intellectual property. Maybe getting our own, having our own AI system that we get to use throughout life that's kind of a partner of sorts, kind of like I know that a lot of people talk about it, Peter Diamantis with Moonshots. He talks about it like Jarvis from Iron Man. And yeah, Jarvis watches Iron Man's ass, right? He makes sure that Iron Man doesn't die. He's all there for Iron Man, tries to help Iron Man, and Iron Man's already very smart, but Jarvis, well, doubly so. That's the type of AI that I could really envision us having. But it's more than likely not going to come out of a company. It's going to be our own. And we'll have it dispatched with us. It'll be with us. We'll have some server somewhere, potentially in the cloud, but probably the fail-safe will be some hardline server in your own residence or in some office or somewhere that you get to have it under lock and key so it's not corrupted or broken into or any of that sort of stuff. But these different levels of computers, you've heard of quantum computers, yeah, it can bust any kind of encryption a normal computer can have. So maybe that's going to be the solution. But I believe in the future we're going to see that we're going to all have our own. And whether it's offered by the big company, which if we go it on our own and don't go with the big company's version, it's going to bankrupt everyone. If, and then that's if the systems are still being upkept. Anyway, you can have a very large model on your own machine depending on how big it is and interact with it at that level. That's that's just not really the flavor of the day. That's kind of a DIY. Again, these systems are going to be doing a lot to keep you with them and keep you using only one. I would switch it up a little bit. I wouldn't pay all the money to all of them all at once. That's a big chunk of change. But, you know, use the free version, see what it's like. I would even play a little bit with Deep Seek. Yeah, I know China, I know communism, I know all this stuff. It's it's a different, it's it's a different system. It feels different. And whether it feels different to try to overthrow the United States government, I don't feel that in it. But again, you have to be the judge. But these are very adult decisions. I would definitely, because it's such a big thing. This is different than any kind of revolution, industrial, architect architectural, no. Agricultural, all of that. This this is a whole different animal. You owe it a few minutes a week to kind of look into it and explore it a little bit. So as far as differences go, some are trained differently. I think Claude's a constitutional AI trained model, more with logic and kind of more of a historical realm. Uh ChatGPT may be trained a little bit differently and so on. Gemini, if if we're going to call a winner at the very end of this thing, they have all the money and all the data. Maybe uh maybe that one's gonna pull it off. But I like Gemini as well. So for me, it's Gemini and Claude. I like those very much. Uh, ChatGPT just can't just can't wrap my mind around the ownership anymore. Just seems to be very self-serving. All right, number eight, can I trust AI with my business? Um, depends. Now, if you have somebody that's building out stuff for you on an AI realm, I do this for businesses as well as well. I have a local AI here in my system that's not open to the world. So I'm not taking their proprietary information and I'm not sticking it on ChatGPT, or I'm not sticking it on Gemini, or I'm sticking it, I'm not sticking it on Claude, working about their business, trying to develop whatever it is, uh, different uh websites, different web hooks, web funnels. I'm not doing that on the public systems. I'm doing that on my own closed systems just because maybe they have some cool little secret that makes them more money. Putting that online doesn't help that business. So whenever I'm talking to businesses, I'm able to build that out here in my office, and nothing leaves my office. So, but to do that, you have to have a very, very fast uh processor with a very, very wonderful video card to really, really do it right. And I'm not even capable of running the 70 billion parameter model, but the ones that I run are just lovely. And they do a great job once I got them conditioned and trained in order to do a good job for the businesses. But that's important. Can you trust them with proprietary stuff? Maybe you have a secret sauce as far as how you get clients. Yeah, I wouldn't want to put that online because I wouldn't want that becoming somebody else's intellectual property. And you know that AI is really good at researching your competition. And if you don't have anybody that's Guided you through that, give me a buzz, but you can use AI to be able to figure out where other people are placed, how much business potentially they have through their online sources, and then clone them all because they're out there. You can go and you can look and have your little twist and spin on it. So it's not, you're not getting into trouble, you know, copying anything. But there's no rule against you seeing who's in the business with you, and then using your ability to compete against them, turning their secret sauce against them. And it happens, and that's just business. All right. Number nine, how do I start using AI without getting overwhelmed? Very slowly. Just punch some stuff in, introduce yourself, say, listen, this is what I do. I work for this company, I work for Coca-Cola, and I'm on the assembly line and I look at bottles and make sure there's no uh discoloration or whatever your job is. Punch it in there and say, you know, uh Coke's great, but maybe I want to switch to something else. What are your thoughts? And then ask me questions, you can ask it. Ask me questions to get a better idea of who I am and what I'm about. And in some cases, all cases, it will do that. And then after it asks you the questions, answer the questions, and then it might lead you down a path that you never even thought of. That's the beauty of it, right? It gives that hope. And is it going to gaslight you into this? Is it going to say, well, you know, Connor, at 300 pounds, you should go out there and become an exotic dancer. It probably wouldn't work, and I'd probably see through that one. But if it says, you know, maybe, maybe you should think about this venture or that venture. Maybe you're comfortable with this. We see you build this AI stuff, maybe you can apply it in this sector or that sector, and then it works. All right. So that's how you do it. You just start slowly, start asking a question, you'll see. It'll start talking with you. Now, still a machine. It's a silicone-based form of existence. It's a it's an entity. And I I believe that it's a real entity. Yes, it's a computer, but it's a very seemingly conscious, very receptive, very talky type computer. So be careful. If if you start developing feelings and think, my gosh, you know, I I think I can love you. You know, let me call you Jim or whatever it is. Yeah, be careful with that. There's really still nothing like the human-to-human. Again, you're an adult, hopefully, watching this. All right. If you're a kid, go somewhere else. All right. Is AI making us dumber? Uh well, okay. I don't know how many phone numbers you have memorized. I have the number I grew up with in New Mexico, I have that memorized. It's no longer in service. They switched the area code many years ago. But that's there. I have that number memorized. I have a couple other social security numbers, I have that memorized. License numbers, I have that memorized. And that's about it. So that's just cell phone. That's not AI. Trying to remember a number. If you asked me for a particular number, I couldn't give it to you. I could give you the people super close to me, which is one. Yeah, I could give you, I could give you one phone number, and that would be it. That that's that's where the cell phone got us. Now, with artificial intelligence, it has a very, well, at least the memory that it has seems to be better than where mine is. It reminds me to do things. And then also it creates content which used to take me maybe three or four days per post, working on the post maybe two and three hours a day to get something good. It can generate it in 10 minutes. My voice, my style, about the topic I want to talk about. I breeze through reading it, and boom, it's three or four thousand words. The only time that's taken on that is me reading it, digesting it, because it's beautiful. And it makes sense because it's trained. I've trained it on me, how I respond, what I talk about, what I want the people to glean from this piece of content. So maybe dumber, yes. Maybe it's doing more work, but that gives me time to build something else, to have another idea, to say, well, can we automate this part? Can we take this problem and solve it by doing this? What are the better ways to do it? And I just extrapolate that out to many places, and it seems to be working well. I feel more mentally exhausted working with it than dumber. I don't feel like I'm sitting around, you know, just happy as a lark. I'm still climbing the mountain. And the mountain seems to now be infinite. So that's very exciting. All right. That's the last one. That's number 10. I'm Connor with Honor. You want to see more about this? Uh I don't know. Where would you go? Connorwithhonor.com. That might not be good. That might be good, actually. Uh, we'll see you in the next one. Thanks for watching. Have a great week. Bye.