'AS BIG AS THE INTERNET, IF NOT BIGGER'

THE HOSTS OF AI FOR HUMANS ON AI'S POTENTIAL FOR GOOD, BAD, AND DOWNRIGHT SILLY

- DAMIEN MARTIN

When the internet first became mainstream, the word on everyone’s lips was that it was the future of everything. To be successful, the feeling was, brands and businesses absolutely had to have a website to promote or something internet-related to talk about or they’d slip into irrelevancy. The hype was everywhere, and it was deafening.

“What’s funny is, they were all right, but they weren’t right on the timeline,” Gavin Purcell, co-host of the AI for Humans podcast, told BOSS.

History seems to be repeating itself with the explosion of AI. Seemingly everyone is rushing to jump on the AI bandwagon, whether they really know what to do with it yet or not. Purcell, an Emmy winner who has served as showrunner for “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” and has an extensive new media background, and co-host Kevin Pereira, a multimedia creative and former mainstay on G4 TV, are tech enthusiasts and lovers.

That doesn’t mean, though, that they’re above pointing out some of the silliness that comes along with any new wave of tech. There is a lot of hype around AI, to be sure. Pereira joked that at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, “If you had a product in 2023, you just brought it back out again in 2024, but you made sure AI was on the box.”

We might not really need AI-enabled lawn mowers or washing machines, for example, but what’s with AI coming really is “as big as the internet, if not bigger,” Purcell said.

USEFUL RIGHT AWAY

What differentiates AI is that even in its infancy, there are already many helpful use cases.

“This stuff is useful today. You’re not in search of a use case for it.” Pereira said. “If you are a coder, you will write code faster. Maybe not cleaner, but you will certainly write code faster if you’re coding with an AI assistant.”