The Age of Generative & Agentic AI

I felt like this was an important blog to put out near the beginning of this journey because this is important to me – and next to all my SEO “what is digital wellness” blogs, which obviously used Generative (Gen)AI in the making of those – I wanted to let you know where I stand. While there is a strong new movement of anti-AI rhetoric, I’ve been thinking deeply about what my relationship is with GenAI and Agentic AI, my digital wellness, and with Evergreen. So here are my thoughts and feelings about this whole new age.

Beautiful flower (Rose of Sharon) from my backyard to take a break from my talk about GenAI.

Where to begin? We are in such an interesting period to be alive, just as all humans before us. They all had interesting times too. With the rise of social media, which has amplified the need to always be connected and consuming, we are in a time where our data is the most precious resource on the planet – or at least that’s what they tell us.

I would argue a more precious resource could be clean air, clean water, and the many plants and animals that call this planet home too, but the point of this blog is to talk about Generative and Agentic AI.

Data is a valuable resource and is the primary income for companies like the social media and AI giants (you know the ones). People think that Instagram and Facebook are social media companies, but I tell my students, they are data companies first, social media companies second. Now we are in an even newer age where it feels like GenAI companies are inevitable with their usage and proliferation into our lives.

I’ll be honest – I am a bit stressed about this for a lot of reasons. One big reason I wanted to address this is we’ve seen this play out before, in the aforementioned social media companies. We have this new technology (which Generative and other AI have been around a lot longer than the masses think, but regardless), that is rolling out and breaking things in this race to be the biggest, best, most adopted technology there is out there. Another company was and is notoriously known for the saying “Move fast and break things,” and although that particular motto was retired in 2014, the motto “move fast” is still here today. The urgency and pressure are still here, deeply entrenched in our society in the United States.

It feels like another huge social experiment, just like the social media companies. I encourage you to read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams to see how some of those internal workings played out. Nonetheless, after many years, the negative impacts of social media have finally come to light. Finally, we have warnings from the US Surgeon General and the American Psychological Association on how social media for younger humans has negative impacts (I argue the older population and other vulnerable groups are still highly at risk). Australia became the first country to ban social media for those under 16, and France has followed as the first European country to do so. And in a landmark case, Meta (and Google) was finally held accountable for the intentional, addictive design it’s used in creating these platforms. I want to be clear – I am not anti-social media, just like I am not anti-AI. I do think we need to recognize the negative impacts, and it is these companies’ responsibility to do something about it.

Now here we are again, with this proliferation of moving fast. We’ve seen Superbowl, World Cup, and prime time commercials, billboards, subway posters, and headline after headline talking about how GenAI is here, how it’s so amazing, how it’s increasing productivity exponentially, and how it is taking jobs with whatever percentage of jobs being gone by 2030, etc...I’ve talked with friends and colleagues of how companies are integrating these platforms daily into their work – and it seemed to be a common theme that friends have said if I hear one more thing about AI in my workplace I am going to lose it!! It’s interesting to me that we continue to get these rather positive headlines as the IPO of some of those companies are becoming public…

It’s now been a few years since GenAI has been adopted by the masses. I’ll admit when it first came out, I was impressed at how easily it could do a marketing plan or help write a social media caption. I was stoked by the opportunity to get some of my time back by having it do tasks that aren’t as fun for me. But as the time has gone on and I’ve used it more – I have the strong opinion that it isn’t as good as the headlines say it is. And consumers have already been craving authentic content since the 2010s, and even more so with AI slop. On top of that, you need to be good at prompt engineering as an entirely different skill set and must learn which platform is best for what because they are all actually quite different in their outputs. Further, the amount of fabrication, hallucinations, and just plain being wrong I’ve experienced with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others isn’t insignificant. I want to repeat I am not anti-AI, but I am also terrified for the planet while I sit writing this and we have the most acres burned on record this early in the summer in Oregon.

For those who are using these GenAI tools, there are some amazing things you can do, no doubt about that, but the human judgement is still needed. And the human creativity and touch is still yearned for by employees and consumers.

One of the reasons I created this blog is because I am personally tired of consuming and being passive. I am more of a “lurker” on social media anyway, and research shows us that being active instead of passive is better for our well-being, although still increasing anxiety. I am tired of taking information and then regurgitating it for work or someone else, checking off a box. I want to start contributing outwardly through writing because I have a lot of thoughts, strong feelings, and expertise. Truly, I haven’t sat down and written like this since I was in high school. It was always for an academic paper or assignment, a journal article in my doctoral program, for a company or someone else, and I spent a lot of my free time consuming other people’s content.

And with Agentic AI, there are many times we aren’t even speaking with a human or reading content developed by humans. There is a time and place for those things (like for my SEO helping blogs). But there are times where we need the human behind the screen to be there. There is such a strong anti-AI movement being driven by consumers, and I have been seeing companies adopting this messaging or strategy now as what makes them different or the option for you. I’ve seen apps refusing to use it, commercials like the large bank Chase messaging about it, and we’ve seen countless protests and communities stop data centers from being built near them. I am here for it. We need sustainable solutions for these monumental and terrifying problems.

So now here I am, reflecting on that nuance. I do use GenAI in my work, from teaching to research and consulting - Claude is my go-to, being slightly more ethical with their “opt-in” data collection policy versus the default being “opt-out” and we are taking your data. I have found again – it is not as good as everyone thinks, and many human tasks take less time, like writing an email response or figuring out my grocery list. I intentionally slow down in moments like those. But I do think it is also a good tool to help in many ways that we are just beginning to explore. Just like life – it is not black and white, even though social media makes it feel like that sometimes, and there is nuance to this new era we are in. It’s important to consider all that nuance.

But I did want to make it clear – there are times for GenAI to help, and there are times when it needs to be 100% Ashley. And a post about the use of GenAI and Agentic AI felt like a 100% Ashley time.

This is something I bring with me in my Evergreen Digital Wellness Practice, too. Let me help you figure out how you can use GenAI in your organization and who you will be using it. There are times to use it and times not to, and understanding your employees, your consumers, and your people is critical to your success.

Closing out, just so you know, this was 100% written by me, with the help of Grammarly when I transferred it from my Word Doc to my Blog online. I will use GenAI to help with some blogs that I write – truth be told, I am not a very strong writer. I normally write in a stream of consciousness and have had many professors tell me I need more structure. But this is my blog, and I am going to write how I want to write. I also blank pretty much every time I go to start writing, so it helping with outlines and structure is helpful for me. I also used GenAI to help build the structure of this website; however, I went back and replaced all images with those created by humans who are credited or from me. My sister and I rewrote the website copy together (because she is much better than me at that), and I felt like the human touch is important in a company like this. For the logo, I had some help with ideation but ended up building it on Canva myself, which I am very proud of.

If you made it this far, thank you for caring enough to read through my stream of consciousness – take a break and go take a short walk without your phone or headphones. Your brain will thank you.

Ashley