Introducing Lieder AI: AI Help for Normal People

Due to the overwhelming number of people asking me about AI over the past few years—both existing, paying clients and new prospects—today I’m announcing Lieder AI, a new standalone brand under the Lieder Digital umbrella.

I want to help business owners navigate this brave new world we live in that seems to be moving ever faster and, often feels, like it’s spinning out of control.

There are many things I could say here (and will over time), but just to kick things off, here are three main observations I have about artificial intelligence and how it’s affecting businesses right now.

#1: AI is scaring the heck out of a lot of people.

The world was already tricky enough for many people to navigate and understand with all the web technologies and automation we’ve had access to for years.

Now, it seems, AI has been thrown into the mix like a hand grenade: either it’s already blowing things up, or it may explode at some time in the future, and nobody knows when.

My first goal is to help people take the fear out of this. I would call myself a timid “enthusiastic accelerationist,” and believe in the inherent potential for AI to do amazing things for humanity, if we’re careful.

Part of that will be finding out how to stop scaring people with its potential, and help them understand how to use it for their own personal benefit. When that happens, perhaps we can agree on how best to move forward with AI as a society, with maximum benefit for everyone involved.

#2: AI is confusing, even to people who use complex technologies every day.

This is perhaps more of a surprise for me than the first: there is a LOT of very bad information out there about AI, as well as things that are just plain confusing.

What will AI replace? What won’t (or can’t) it replace? Where should we use AI and where shouldn’t we? What are the best AI engines, who created them, how fast are they iterating new versions, and… a lot more.

Should we really fire all the trained copywriters and English majors in the world and fill the internet with AI-generated, keyword-stuffed slop? No, I don’t think so. But a lot of other people do think so, and will probably do this.

How do we balance these things? How can we put AI to use where AI serves best and put humans to work doing what only humans can do?

I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest expert on AI: I’m not a machine learning scientist with a PhD in neural networks or anything like that. But I do have almost two full decades of working with computers and web technology, and I’ve spent the bulk of my time in that role learning how things work, breaking down complex topics into simple explanations, and waiting patiently as I help others succeed.

My second goal is to serve as an “AI Guide” for those who would like some hand-holding or coaching from someone who sits in front of a computer all day, every day, researching and testing these kinds of things in real life, and providing data and proof of success.

#3: Everybody’s talking about AI. Very few people know how to use it well.

A few months ago, I got an email from a friend out of the blue. It said, “Hey, check this out—one of my buddies fed some pages from my website into ChatGPT and asked it to write a song about my company over the weekend.”

I read the attached poem and found it… interesting. It was a little bit cute, a little bit funny, and a little bit ingenious. But what was the point? What purpose did it serve?

Nothing really, other than being a nice “party trick” to laugh at. That’s fun if that’s your goal: I have no problem with using AI to come up with silly songs, pretend poems, or fart jokes.

The bigger question is: how can you leverage AI like a fulcrum to move your business (or life) forward in a meaningful way without wasting time?

That would be the ultimate trick—a true life hack of sorts—and way better than a cheap parlor game to get laughs.

My third goal is to help people who run organizations—nonprofits, small businesses, agencies, etc—to walk through this potential minefield, taking AI seriously and not just finding better ways to rhyme goofy words.

Finally, I’ll conclude with an important quote that was the first thing I heard that truly got me interested in AI in the first place.

In 2023, at the New York Times’ event Dealbook Summit, Elon Musk was interviewed about all kinds of things. (Yes, that interview where he said some profane words that went viral. That’s not what I’m referring to here, though.)

Something he said halfway through the discussion caught my attention immediately:

“I read Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” which is a book on philosophy in the form of humor. And the point that Adams was making there was that we don’t actually know what questions to ask.

That’s why he said: “The answer is 42.” Basically, Earth’s a giant computer and it came up with the answer “42.” But then to actually figure out what the question is, that’s the actual hard part.

And I think this is generally true also in physics. At the point at which you can… properly frame the question, the answer is, actually, the easy part.

My motivation then was that “Well, my life is finite, really a flash in the pan on a galactic time scale,” but if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to figure out what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.

And maybe we can find out the meaning of life or even… what the right question to ask is.”

Elon Musk

Whether you’re an especially big fan of Elon Musk or not is entirely beside the point.

The founder of xAI, an $80 billion intergalactic AI company is saying something really important: the trick isn’t knowing the answers. It’s in knowing the right questions to ask.

In my mind, AI will not (and cannot) be used optimally until this happens.

That’s what Lieder AI is all about. That’s why I started this.

I look forward to seeing where this goes, and all the ways I can help companies do the hard part, and only then, finding the answer.

(On a final note: you notice how I used the world “people” ten times here? That’s very important to me. It’s all about people. It always has been. It always will be.)