This page was translated from Dutch with AI.
If you lock down AI, you get shadow AI
Perhaps you recognise this. Your organisation has rolled out Copilot, or its own AI tool. It came with a long list of what is not allowed. And a few people received a licence to 'play' a bit first. The rest are waiting. Meanwhile, every day you see things you could do with AI in fifteen minutes, and which you are now doing by hand.
In a training session, a group told me exactly that. The tool was assigned from above, to a handful of people, and they would decide later what was useful. I honestly said then that I am not comfortable with that. Because if people are not allowed to do anything, they will not wait. They will find their own way.
At the bottom of this article you will find a prompt to help you prepare a conversation with your team about what they are already doing with AI. Feel free to copy it.
This is how shadow AI starts
I was once in an organisation that was locked down on all sides. Extra privacy legislation applied there on top of GDPR, and I understand that too. During the break, I heard two participants talking to each other. 'We cannot do anything with our Copilot here. Can you not sort that out? You do that at home too, right?' They were actually asking each other how they could bypass Microsoft.
That is the danger. Everyone has a smartphone. You take a picture of your screen, or you email a document to yourself. And then you 'just quickly' do it in your own ChatGPT, because it works there. At that moment, that data is gone, outside of any agreement your organisation has ever made. We call that shadow AI. I actually find it a bit ironic: the strictest rules produce the most shadow work. The organisation that wants to keep everything inside gets people who email it outside themselves.
You do not need to be a rocket scientist for that, nor malicious. Most people just want to do their jobs well. And in security, humans are always the weakest link, precisely because they are so resourceful.
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