Today’s guest author is Justin Kirkham. Justin is a Boise State University alumni and who works as a deputy assignment editor at Community.co where he leads the Forbes Technology Council and Forbes Communication Council, invite-only community programs that feature publishing benefits for members. For more information on Justin and his work, please visit his LinkedIn page.
In March 2023, I had the opportunity to attend the Hansberger Endowed Chair in Business Ethics’ first-ever business ethics roundtable event on generative AI, followed by the second event on plastic in fall 2023. Now two sessions strong, these dinner-and-discussion events (what some attendees have fondly described as dinner parties featuring important questions) have featured an impressive list of attendees, including local business leaders, Boise State students and alumnus from various programs, instructors and researchers from multiple disciplines and community members with their own unique perspectives.
For this first event, we were tasked with discussing the now-monolithic topic of artificial intelligence and its ethical implications on businesses and consumers alike. This was a timely event, held just after the initial boom of ChatGPT. In my own work as a deputy assignment editor for the Forbes Technology Council and the Forbes Communication Council, invite-only community programs that feature publishing benefits for members, I was starting to see a distinct rise in AI-generated content leveraged as thought leadership and marketing copy.
Prior to this first event, participants were sent a bit of reading material to get them a bit more familiar with the topic at hand. Upon arrival, we were given name tags and our seating assignments, and we had the chance to mingle and chat with other attendings a bit before settling in.
As we enjoyed our appetizers, endowed chair Ruth Jebe gave us a quick primer on the current state of AI ethics and posed a few important questions on the topic to the group: Is AI something we should be afraid of? Will AI help or hinder business processes? Is the use of AI something consumers should be concerned about? What biases or problems does the use of AI in business pose?
After we were made sufficiently optimistic about the state of the world, we were set loose in our small groups, assigned by table. Each table had a few unique prompts to consider in their discussion, but we weren’t limited to those questions. Our table took a few minutes to introduce ourselves and our work with AI: In addition to myself, we had graduate students from Boise State’s Career Track MBA program, a health care professional, business analytics and intelligence leaders and local executives at the table.
Once we finished those small-group discussions, and once we had enjoyed our entrees and dessert, we debriefed as a full room, sharing our insights and answering lingering questions that some tables had from their own discussions. Overall, I think we were able to steer clear (mostly) of the doom and gloom and came away with some great insights on the importance inevitability of, as well as the qualifying needs of, AI in business today.
AI is now an omnipresent player in our world. It can write our content, code our software and streamline our business tools, sometimes to great success and sometimes to great detriment. But we don’t often stop to think about the implications it might have on the data it utilizes or the people consuming its output.
AI-generated content is still, and likely will always be, a problem in the publishing industry. In fact, it’s gotten worse—and harder to track and identify. Even now, I think back to the discussions we had at this first roundtable when editing (or rejecting) AI-generated copy or working with clients writing thought leadership content about AI tools and best practices.
I would highly, highly recommend securing a seat at the chair’s upcoming business ethics roundtable events, including the next set to take place on April 3rd. If you’re on the fence or hoping to learn a bit more about the event before signing up for a spot, there are a few points I’d keep in mind:
- You don’t need to be an expert in whatever topic we’re dealing with to bring your own input to the table. Of course, experts bring a depth of knowledge that is essential to these discussions, but your perspective as a consumer, business leader or hopeful player in the industry holds its own value.
- I’d highly suggest taking a bit of time before the event to identify ways in which the topic up for discussion might affect your industry. The most important perspective you can bring to the table is your own experience, and these topics, while sometimes technical or niche, still have applications in most spaces.
- These events feature small- and large-group discussions, as well as a primer before you jump into those discussions. You won’t be caught off guard without need-to-know information, and you’ll have a chance to discuss in that smaller group before jumping to the full-room debrief—you’re eased into the fray, so to speak.
These events are an excellent way to stay plugged into some topics you likely encounter often in your day-to-day business dealings but don’t regularly have the chance to analyze, like AI and plastic waste (we had the chance to broach this topic at the second event). These roundtables make time for those discussions, and while, as Ruth Jebe is the first to point our during these events, we aren’t going to solve these problems over one dinner, they can open a dialogue that allows us to keep them top-of-mind moving forward.