AI Jobs

It occurred to me the other day that there is a pretty short list of jobs that AI would be absolutely well suited to perform.

My first suggestion would be to have AI filter e-mail.  For example, have the AI check the originating address of the email.  Does it exist?  Does the remote server confirm it?  Does the email require the response to go to another email address?  Is the sender's address ridiculously long?  I mean like 20-or-more character spelling nothing in any language?  Drop the message in the bit bucket.  Don't bother passing it onwards.

Another job - verifying backups.  As in, once the backup completes, check a random file.  One that was somewhere on the tape, not at the end or the beginning, just somewhere.  Validate it against the source.  Verify it can be copied off the tape, onto a hard drive, and the restored version is exactly the same as the original file still out there.

Verify user behavior patterns.  I mean, when I log in, I tend to do the same things in roughly the same order.  Never EXACTLY The same, but close to it.  So check those behaviors against previous patterns.  Did my account log in and then attempt to look at accounting records?  Well, there's a potential hacker who somehow stole my password.

Verify connections.  If a user connects to a server in a way that they've never done before, challenge the user.  Make sure they verify information that they would know.  

Now, granted, I'm no longer in IT, so I don't know that these are NOT being done, but I can tell you that as far as Microsoft goes, they're missing a giant opportunity for advertising the quality of their AI tools by not filtering Hotmail.  Yeah, it's free.  Development costs money.  But is there a bigger database of incoming and outgoing messages they could use?  Is there a more likely target for spam?  I can tell you when I checked my account Friday morning and found that 167 new spam messages had arrived after the 63 I'd cleaned out the night before at 10 pm, and there were 167 messages that had arrived by 5:45 am the next morning.  That's insane.  

I'm sure there are people out there trying to come up with helpful ways to use AI, not just for "deepfake" crap, and it could be useful.  Or it could be a smoke screen.  Who knows.  I guess we'll have to stick around and find out...