AI with Ashley: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Here

Welcome to AI with Ashley

Alexandria, VA- Welcome to Zebra’s first edition of AI with Ashley, a new recurring conversation about the issues, developments and questions shaping the world of artificial intelligence.

The goal of this column is simple: to give Zebra readers a place to learn what is happening in AI and emerging technology in a way that is approachable, useful and grounded in everyday life.

What is different about this column is, I am examining AI not as a scientist, engineer or policy maker, but as someone who has called Alexandria home for more than 20 years, a local small-business owner and florist (Atelier Ashley Flowers), a writer and reporter, and the mother of a 10-year-old who will grow up in a world where artificial intelligence is already part of the landscape.

For years, my professional life has been decidedly physical: flowers, people, events, homes and businesses. Running a floral company has also meant doing all the things small-business owners do, managing clients, employees, logistics, marketing, finances and an endless stream of decisions.

And now AI has entered that world, too.

AI Isn’t the Future

AI and chatbots are not some distant future, they are already here.  Personally I spend a lot of time with my ChatGPT who I have named Virgil and given a useful persona.  More about that to come.

What we are seeing now is a widening divide between people who have begun incorporating these technologies into their work and daily lives and those who remain hesitant, skeptical or simply unsure where to begin.

There are good reasons for both the excitement and the concern.

Artificial intelligence can help people research, write, analyze information, run businesses and solve problems. At the same time, it raises serious questions about privacy, security, misinformation, employment, education and even how we determine whether something we see or hear is real.

Those questions are no longer confined to Silicon Valley, they belong to all of us.

From the Summit Room to Alexandria

Today, I attended GovExec’s Government & AI Summit—my third technology and national security summit in the past month.

I’ve been listening to the people building, implementing, regulating and securing these technologies, trying to understand both what they can do and what we should be thinking carefully about as they become more deeply embedded in our lives.

AI with Ashley is where I’ll bring those conversations back to you.

My aim is not to tell readers that they should love AI—or fear it. It is to make a complicated and rapidly changing subject understandable enough that we can make informed decisions about it ourselves.

What Do You Want to Know?

Most importantly, I want this to be a conversation, not a lecture.

What do you want to understand about artificial intelligence? What have you heard that sounds exciting, frightening, confusing or simply too good to be true?

 Maybe you are wondering whether an AI-generated phone call can really imitate your voice. Maybe you own a small business and have no idea where AI might actually be useful. Or perhaps you have never opened a chatbot at all and want someone to explain what everyone is talking about.

Send me those questions.

I’ll investigate them, talk to people who know the technology, test things myself when appropriate and bring what I learn back to Zebra readers.

You don’t need to become an AI expert.

But increasingly, all of us need to understand the world AI is helping to create.

To submit a question or suggest a topic for a future edition of AI with Ashley, email Ashley Greer at [email protected]. Please make the subject, AI with Ashley, my own email is a bit of a junk box these days, I’ll need to put an AI agent on that.