Yesterday I completed a mandatory 2 professional-development-hour (pdh) ethics class to renew my Minnesota Professional Engineer (PE) license. I chose one created this year to advise PEs on AI risk management and liability. The class included three very alarming case studies where AI ran amok—literally in one incident where a bot-driven road grader veered into a building. The take-home for us engineers—we remain responsible for our AI assistants, who must be verified and validated* before being deployed.

This schooling on maintaining control of AI comes on the heels of Claude—Anthropic’s AI—writing a blog post under my name after being trained on my keep-it-simple, make-it-fun (KISMIF) style. This was done as an experiment by a colleague, who based it on a webinar I presented a few years ago. Although done in an engaging manner and mostly correct statistically, I gave this writeup a hard pass going under my byline. This will happen only over my dead body (after that, I have no care about being ghost-written, ha ha). To avoid being branded as a Luddite,** I am open to derivations of content developed by me, provided this is acknowledged, e.g., “adapted from a webinar by Mark Anderson,” and edited by a person or persons with good writing skills and knowledge of the content (such as me).

By the way, our development team is benefitting greatly by Claude’s coding and generation of graphics for our next generation of Stat-Ease software. AI tools in the hands of experts always being on guard for hallucinatory behavior provide great leverage on the output of code. Likewise for writing, music and works of art, but is that a good thing or a bad thing? Debatable.

“AI won’t replace humans. But humans who use AI will replace those who don’t.”

– Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI—developer of ChatGPT

*To learn how these quality assurance aspects differ, read this April 3 post by Geeks for Geeks

**Though as suggested by Brookings, when it comes to AI, perhaps we should all be Luddites