This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

If you follow the news these days, the letters “A” and “I” will make sense to you.

They stand for “artificial intelligence” and, as I write this, far be it from me, who relies on my grandson for tech advice, to come across as some kind of expert.

For me, the answer to the question in the headline is “yes” and “no.”  Good and bad?  Yes.

But, that said, I have run two competing perspectives on A-I.

• One is that, insofar as I understand A-I, it could have a number of threatening uses as it could even be used in criminal activities or international relations.
• A second is that, if organized properly, it could have many positive uses, 35 of which were outlined in a major New York Times article over the weekend.

I have come across A-I in two real-world cases recently.

In one case, a friend of mine told me he used A-I to come up with a written summary of his efforts to become a better golfer.  He gave ChatGPT a few facts and, within seconds, it came up with a blog-like story of his golf ventures – and he said it was very accurate.

In another case, my wife used ChatGPT to provide a few facts about a “dancing poodle” (our family dog is a poodle) and it came up with a story and photos of a dancing poodle, which, it must be said, looked a lot like our poodle, but, I suppose, poodles all look similar.

Regarding the New York Times article, it is worth reading it in its entirely because it contains a thoughtful list of solid uses.

Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is weighing possible rules for A-I tools like ChatGPT.  It is doing so, at least in part, as fears grow over the potential use of artificial intelligence to commit crimes and spread falsehoods.

In a first step toward potential regulation, the Commerce Department published a formal public request for comment on what it called “accountability measures,”including whether potentially risky new A-I models should go through a certification process before they are released.  

The Administration’s action comes amid a boom in the use of artificial-intelligence tools that can quickly generate humanlike writing, images, videos and more, such as the ones I described above.

ChatGPT, the chatbot from Microsoft Corporation start-up, OpenA-I, has been estimated by some analysts to have reached 100 million users faster than any consumer app in history. 

“It is amazing to see what these tools can do even in their relative infancy,” said Alan Davidson, who leads the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Departmentagencythat put out the request for comment. “We know that we need to put some guardrails in place to make sure that they are being used responsibly.” 

So, at base, governing A-I sounds a little to me like early efforts to govern the Internet, when it was in its infancy.

But, whatever your view – pro or con government regulation – the issue with A-I will come down to what the issue is with the Internet:  Developing positive uses, versus negative ones, will be up to individual initiative.

Which, I suppose, is a scary thought, unless, I add, you read the NY Times list and gain some security from positive uses of A-I these days.