I talk about:

🔥How businesses are using AI as a tool for their business operations.

🔥The fact that 35% of global companies are currently utilizing AI and an additional 42% are exploring ways to incorporate it (based on a 2024 study by Exploding Topics).

🔥Ethical considerations and debates surrounding AI usage, including the potential for biases and ownership of AI-generated content.

🔥Some ideas for how business owners can use AI ethically in their business.

Let’s connect:

Episode Transcript:

35% of global companies currently report using AI in their business operations, according to a 2024 study done by Exploding Topics. First of all, love the name. An additional 42% of companies are actively exploring ways to incorporate AI within their organization.  That means a total of over 77% of companies are actively using or exploring ways to incorporate AI into their business somehow, some way, in some form, highlighting its complete significance and growing presence in the business world.

It's partially why we're diving into this today, especially because I've seen a lot of conversation about it lately. Hi. Hello and welcome to Business Unfiltered™: The Podcast. I'm Kristen Kubik and I'm the bridge between ethics and profit and your gatekeeper between you and legal. I'm an Inclusive Marketing Consultant and Business Compliance Advisor dedicated to helping companies run ethically and make sure all voices are heard.

I'm going to take a second and shamelessly plug the fact that Six Figure Messaging, my signature group offering, starts March 18th. When this episode releases, it's going to be March 15th, which means it'll be a couple days away. 

Six figure messaging is three days toward your next $100K.  I love this course so much. It's so much fun to do. It's also so much fun to be in and be around. So  if you have questions, please feel free to find me on Instagram at Kristen Unfiltered, but you know, your content is good. I know your content is good.

I'm never going to be a person who tells them when their content is. And we're spending three days together amplifying it to expand your audience of potential buyers to include people who are often forgotten about. Marketing, in general, is always geared toward a certain speed.  Pacific set of people, a certain specific demographic, leaving an entire realm of other people that are historically excluded. 

That being said, I created six figure messaging to look at more inclusive messaging, more inclusive content. This round we are focusing also not just on inclusivity, but also more on accessibility.  That way we're diversifying even more the kind of content that you are bringing forward to your audience.

So not only are you peeling to all corners of your ideal buyer, but you're also avoiding any potential legal troubles as well. And I'm going to do an episode later on disability and content and how that all ties together, especially with The Americans with Disabilities Act. So it's $147 to join. The link is going to be in the show notes.

If you're on YouTube it's down below and you can find me on Instagram for more information. Like I said before, at Kristen Unfiltered. Now let's dive in. It's funny because as I was really diving into and looking at this episode, I was  looking at the history of AI. And I am a 90s baby, so I'm clearly an elder millennial.

I was born in 1990, so I was one of the last people to have that kind of pre-internet childhood. So I got to live not only with the pre-internet, but the rise of the internet. I still remember those days where, and I'm not going to try to like,  be all nostalgic too much, but I still remember the days where you had to like, plug in the like, internet and it took away from the telephone.

And if someone was trying to call, you got kicked off and, you know, you had your mom always screaming to get off the internet because like she was expecting a phone call or, you know, it was just, there was so much whenever it came to technology. That everyone was clearly trying to figure out.  And I think it was really interesting to look at the kind of early stages of AI, if you will, because it went back really to like the 1950s to where the like kind of formation of computer science really took off and really looking at how  the creation of what is considered intelligent machinery was  dealt with.

Now, I'm not going to dive into the history of AI. I could always do that at another time, if that's interesting to somebody. Some people it is, a lot of people it's not. So, I could always do that at another time. That being said, whenever I was looking at the, like, going further into it, there was kind of that, like, renewed interest right about the time I was I was like really growing up.

So the 90s through the 2010s and that was when we really saw like the iPhone for instance. We saw the iPod, the different iPods, the iPod nanos, the different iPhones, we all evolved from the brick Nokia to the sidekick. My husband and I were talking about the sidekick not long ago to the iPhone to, you know, whatever everyone has now. 

I personally am a Samsung girly. Sorry to everybody. I have the green bubble. There were just so many different forms and formations that I was able to like look at in this episode and doing the research for it. But then there was what was considered the age of transformation. And that was really 2010 to now. 

And If you look at the quote age of transformation, that was really the rise of just like big data and the cloud. So that was when everything started like gearing toward a cloud movement. Everything was saved toward the cloud. Like Google was Google drive. Microsoft came out with one drive, like Xbox now does like cloud gaming. 

Like there's, you know, Apple, it saves everything to the iCloud. There's so many different forms of a virtual like save basically to where you quote, never lose anything. Right. So it was almost very overwhelming to look at in real time, but also to read all the different changes that have happened in my, what, 33 years so far.

I'm entering my 34th year. I'll be 34 at the end of this year looking at all of that, right? So, it,  and I know people who are going to listen to this. This, that being like maybe older than I am, maybe younger than I am, they're all going to have different opinions on it, or they might have a very similar opinion on it.

That being said, AI now transforms  everything, whether it's an industry, whether it's, you know, your personal life, whether it's just general day to day.  It transforms things at an unprecedented pace. It automates tasks. It optimizes processes, it even like it generates content for you. It does all of these different things.

It even helps with healthcare and surgeries and it's just insane to watch how much things are automated or, you know, artificial at this point.  But it's, it's very, it's very cool. That being said.  Do you own AI content? As a business owner, as a content creator, do you own AI content? That's where we're going to get into because that is the tricky part.

The tricky part is not just do you own it, but why do or do you not own it? Now there's a big debate with the necessity or the usage in general of AI. There's a big ethics usage, there's a big inclusivity usage. There's a big accessibility usage debate, and I see both sides because when we're talking about.

I understand both sides of the debate, because here's the thing, when it comes to AI, there are text to voice and voice to text transcription, that is considered AI. 

The automatic snippets that programs can create out of one video, that is considered AI.  Those are very convenient. They are also very accessible. They're also very inclusive, especially for someone who may not have time, who may be disabled, who might be, who might have ADHD, who might be autistic, who might have, you know, any disease under the sun that like prevents them from doing certain things, who might just be exhausted all the time, who might be working two, three, four jobs and trying to do content creation on the side. There are so many different reasons that AI can help and can be a good thing. 

That being said, there are also places where AI is very, very, very unethical. There are places where AI has been known to be racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist. 

There are multiple and so many examples where AI generated content is often geared toward  thin, white, blonde people, notoriously men, not women. And it's, I don't have, I'm not putting my opinions in this, I'm stating facts because there have been studies done, there have bee talking and showing examples all over like anywhere, honestly, you pick a platform, you're going to find an example, at least four to five, most likely hundreds. 

But there are so many different ways to where people are finding the good and the bad to where we all recognize there's always a duality, right? It's never black and white. There's always the gray area. There's always nuance to these things. That being said, when we're talking about if you own your content,  there was actually a court case that was denied to be heard by the Supreme Court.

And this court case, the reason they did not and the reason they denied to hear it was because they actually initially thought that the ruling is A, it was dealt with, but B, there was no reason for it to be heard as a constitutional case. If you are unfamiliar with why or why the Supreme Court, the US does or does not hear court cases, it's because they only hear cases that have to do with the Constitution. They're only supposed to hear court cases that go for or against the Constitution. So anything that is questionable about the Constitution, that is what they are supposed to hear. 

That being said, this specific case  is, it was determined that this is not a constitutional case. In that court case, it is, that being said, this case, Thaler v. Vidal, it was a case that went all the way up to the United States Courts of Appeals for the federal court. The entire case. The issue was whether an AI system can be listed as an inventor on a patent application. 

Now, this has to do with two things. This has to do with AI in general. This also has to do with intellectual property rights. So we're talking, when we're talking about intellectual property, we're talking about copyright patent trademark. Those are the things we're talking about. What happened was, Steven Thaler was an inventor who filed two patent applications naming an AI system called Dabus. Dabus as the inventor or partial inventor of the system, that software that he had created. The US Patent and Trademark Office, the USPTO, as I will most likely refer to it, rejected. So, the USPTO, what they will do is they will go through for a patent application and they will look at who is the inventor because patent and trademark law has not caught up to the fact that there's so much AI, there's so much digital, there's so much, you know.

So modernization, if you will, they will not identify any one other than anything other than a human. So it has to be human derived. 

So, that being said, Thaler sued the USPTO arguing that the Patent Act did not explicitly require inventors to be human. If you are unfamiliar with the Patent Act,  it was an act designed  to essentially lay out all of the requirements for filing, achieving, and keeping a patent. It also made and formed the USPTO, so the Patent and Trademark Office. 

That being said, the purpose of the act  was to promote innovation by granting inventors exclusive rights to their inventions for a limited time. Now that limited time is 20 years, so it's a very long time.  However, if you are granting inventors exclusive rights to their inventions, but you're naming an AI as the inventor,  Does that make sense?

I'm not here to lay my opinion. I'm here to let you think about it. Got it. That being said, they argued that there was no wording that said an AI could not be the name on the patent application or a name on a patent application.  The court ended up actually ruling in favor of the PTO, so the court interpreted the term.

So I'm going to read the sentence. The previous rulings and previous statements. So that being said, the significance of this was massive. The fact that you can not hold IP protection, intellectual property protection, the fact that you cannot hold this protection, if you are using an AI as the name or disclosing that you are using AI, it's a big deal. And we saw a lot of this go back and forth not long ago with Midjourney. Now, a lot of the people who use Mid Journey. Mid Journey actually updated their terms and conditions multiple times in 2023 to reflect the not only the rulings of this case, to quote promise. 

That you owned all of your content if you paid for the premium versions. But  when it came down to it, the USPTO was still saying  you don't own your content if you are using AI generated things, that is big. That is a big deal, especially because you've got 77% of businesses over here attempting to or already utilizing AI for their business in general.

And I'm not saying they're using it solely for content, but they are utilizing it for things. I absolutely use AI for my business. I use voice transcriptions all the time. I use automations all the time. What I don't use is things like chatGPT or Google Gemini.  

So I'm going to talk about how you can actually use it for your business in an ethical way. And I actually have a blog post about this too. I'll drop the blog post in the show notes also so you can read a little more. 

A really good way that I love talking about is just to use things like chatGPT, or Google Gemini, I love using Google more than ChatGPT personally, because I'm not a huge fan of OpenAI as a company. That's a whole other subject, nothing against OpenAI personally, like the people who run it necessarily, it’s just not my favorite company. That being said, I love just using it for ideas.

So ideas are really great. A way too just purely to be able to have another place to bounce things off, right? Say I come up with an idea and maybe I came up with an idea for this podcast and I said, Hey, I would love to talk about Thaler v. VDol.  I know what Thaler v. VDol is about. However,  give me a synopsis, break it down a little bit for me, make it a little more digestible because I could talk about it in so many different ways. 

But are you going to understand it if I talk about it in certain ways? Maybe maybe not, right? So there are so many ways that you can use it. A lot of people, what they will do, at least what I'm kind of seeing is they will take a like prompt and they will say, write me a three page blog that does this and that talks about this.

Use this type of voice. The issue is you don't own that content. It's not your content. You cannot copyright that content. Unfortunately,  to do that, you would actually have to just write the content. You can't change it. You can't tweak it. You can't  have it, write it, and then just change a few things. You actually have to write it. 

You could change it. Absolutely use it for maybe some bullet points, maybe some like statistics to find. I love using it to find statistics and then obviously fact checking  because it's not perfect. It's still, it's still people doing, you know, it's still learning things because we have to teach it.

Everything you input, you're teaching it, right? So and that's another ethical conversation is what are we teaching it? Are we teaching it the correct things? Are we teaching it, you know, the things that maybe we shouldn't be? Which is why the way that AI generates content when it comes to graphics is now being put into question.

Because that is a big conversation about what we're starting to notice about how all of the  images are starting to come out. Why are they starting to all look the same? Why are they starting to all like to be in the same realm? Why are they starting to all have the same type of look? It's because it got trained that way and whose fault is that? It's ours. 

So, this is probably one of my favorite cases, I think I've ever come across but they tried to push it to the Supreme Court. It was appealed to the Supreme Court. The court declined to hear it a year ago in March 2023. Now the Supreme Court actually came out and did say in their declination to hear this case. And then, then I'm going to give an example. I was, I was planning on doing this summer this summer, but then I found out while I And that was a very good thing.

Um, and then, um, I really demanded that they get my phone number. Um, and we had a nice conversation and I just kept it a secret until I was happy with it. more prominent, and as we start to see things that  like are done, aren't done, are taken into account, aren't taken into account, I think that's where it's going to be really interesting  to really get a handle on  what is considered the constitutional parts and what aren't.  

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Bye.