Do Your Employees Follow your AI Guidelines?

Unless you override it, your organization’s policy for AI-driven tools is “anything goes.” That’s because your developers want to get their job done as quickly as possible. If that involves having Github Copilot write part of the code or copying a code block into ChatGPT for debugging help, so be it.

If you don’t have secrets, maybe that’s fine with you. But even though OpenAI is not training ChatGPT on user prompts, they have not been very diligent about keeping them safe. You should assume that everything your developers paste into ChatGPT will eventually leak.

That includes your data. AI tools are very good at data cleaning and visualization. Your Data Scientists are surely pasting data into ChatGPT and getting back fully functional Python code to run in a Jupyter Notebook. Unless you tell them not to.

If I asked one of your developers or Data Scientists about your policy on AI tools, would they know it? And would they follow the rules or would they take the 10x or 100x productivity boost?

What do you incentivize?

You get what you reward. Twitter decided to primarily reward user growth, and things went downhill from there. Recently, their head of security quit. Then he filed a whistleblower complaint with the authorities, complaining that Twitter’s security is bad and not getting better. Now there is likely to be a very interesting congressional hearing.

White-hat hacker Peiter Zatko (aka “Mudge”) was hired after a 2020 security breach but could not implement the changes he felt were necessary to fight spam and automated bots. The reason is the incentive structure at Twitter.

You see, Twitter management bonuses are based on user growth. There is no bonus for reducing spam or automated bots. You get what you reward, with no exception. You can reward with money, perks, promotions, or other recognition, but you have to incentivize the behavior you want. If all your incentives are based on quantity and not quality, you will get ever-increasing quantity and ever-decreasing quality.

Risk and Reward

Last week’s episode of my podcast Beneficial Intelligence was about risk and reward. Humans are very good at calculating risk and reward. That means we will do what is best for us, even if it is not the best for the company.

It is easy to create incentives for being fast and cheap, but hard to create good incentives for quality. That’s why we try to use incentives for speed and cost, but try to use QA procedures to ensure quality.

Incentives almost always win over procedures. As CIO, you need to make sure there are also incentives for quality. If not, you can be sure that your procedures will be circumvented, and corners will be cut.

Risk and Reward

This week’s episode of my podcast Beneficial Intelligence is about risks and rewards. Humans are a successful species because we are good at calculating risks and rewards. Similarly, organizations are successful if they are good at calculating the risks they face and the rewards they can gain.

Different people have different risk profiles, and companies also have different appetite for risk. Industries like aerospace and pharmaceuticals face large consequences if something goes wrong and have a low risk tolerance. Hedge funds, on the other hand, takes big risks to reap large rewards.

It is easy to create incentives for building things fast and cheap, but it is harder to create incentives that reward quality. Most organizations don’t bother with quality incentives and try to ensure quality through QA processes instead. As Boeing found out, even a strong safety culture does not protect against misaligned incentives.

As an IT leader at any level, it is your job to consider the impact of your incentive structure. If you can figure out a way to incentivize user friendliness, robustness and other quality metrics, you can create a successful IT organization. If you depend on QA processes to counterbalance powerful incentives to ship software, corners will be cut.

Listen here or find “Beneficial Intelligence” wherever you get your podcasts.