From Curiosity to Capability

A conversational system capable of producing fluent prose on demand became publicly available on 30 November 2022, and within weeks employees in most large organisations were using it without being asked to and without being told they could not. That is the situation this paper addresses. It is a question about organisational learning under uncertainty, and the technology is only the occasion for it. The argument runs against the instinct of the moment. An organisation that moves quickly to deploy will find that it has deployed something it cannot evaluate, because the evaluation capability does not yet exist anywhere, including inside the companies building these systems. An organisation that prohibits use will find that use continues and that it has lost the ability to see it. The position worth occupying sits between those two, and it is a learning system. What follows sets out what could responsibly be known on 31 January 2023, what could be attempted, and what should be refused. It proposes a use-case filter, a bounded-pilot design and a 30-day charter. None of these require new technology, a budget line or a reorganisation. They require somebody named to be accountable for a small number of experiments, and a written record of what happened, kept where the next person can find it.