Do you think you’d be able to tell if this story were written by artificial intelligence? A detection tool designed by a Collingwood resident could have the answer.
For this week’s edition of People of Collingwood we spoke with Jon Gillham, 39, owner of Originality AI.
Q: Where did you grow up?
A: My wife and I both grew up in the area – I grew up in Duntroon, and she grew up in Collingwood. I went to Collingwood Collegiate Institute.
Q: Where did life take you after high school?
A: I went to school for mechanical engineering at McMaster University. That took me to Sarnia for seven years to be an engineer, and do project management.
Q: You’ve started a few businesses since. What led to you wanting to make a foray into entrepreneurship?
A: We knew that we always wanted to get back to Collingwood. At that time, it didn’t seem like there were many opportunities from an employment standpoint, so I worked on building some of my own businesses online when I was in Sarnia, and that led to us being able to get back to Collingwood.
If I can spend 50 days a year at the cottage and 75 days skiing, that’s a pretty good year.
We’ve lived in Collingwood for the past eight years.
Q: Your current business venture, Originality AI, is that one of many ventures?
A: It is one of many, but it’s my current main focus. I would say 80 to 90 per cent of my time is spent on Originality. We also own Clark Pools and Spas in Collingwood, and a bakery in Goderich. I have some online businesses that are on the go too.
Q: What is Originality AI?
A: It’s an AI (artificial intelligence) detection tool. It identifies the probability a document was either created by a human, or created by AI. We built the AI, and we trained it on millions of records of human content and AI content so it can tell the difference between the two.
It started because before Originality, I founded a content-marketing business, so we would sell content to customers. We would buy articles.
We weren’t super happy to find out articles had been copy-and-pasted out of ChatGPT.
We don’t like it being used by academia. The primary users of it now are education institutions to find out if students are cheating. The problem with using it in academia is there is a small rate of false positives (about two per cent), whereas they really need an enforceable level of detection.
The majority of our users are people who publish content on the internet and want to have some controls in place to make sure their website is not being overrun by writers using AI.
We launched the week before ChatGPT launched. There were other AI writing tools at that time that were popular enough causing challenges within the world of hiring writers.
Q: What are your thoughts on the advent of AI and its increase in popularity?
A: I’ve never experienced something that touches this many parts of the world.
Any business is being impacted by this in some way or another. I think there are a lot of ways the simulation plays out. There are scenarios where it doesn’t go very well for humanity.
I think most likely, the optimistic scenario about AI, is that it can only know the cumulative knowledge of the world at that moment. It struggles to go beyond the knowledge of that moment.
I think it will push more communities to be at the forefront or edge of current understanding. It raises an average performer into an exceptional performer and I think it results in more of humanity working at the edge of knowledge and pushes humanity ahead.
Or, it goes badly. One of the two. (laughs)
Q: You do work with the Georgian Bay Accelerator, offering talks on AI. What’s your best piece of advice for someone wanting to start a business?
A: There’s no substitute for gruelling, relentless work.
AI is not going to solve that. There’s no trick.
I don’t love advice about following your passions, but I think it’s important to do something that’s interesting to you and you know really well the problem you’re trying to solve.
If you’re interested and deeply understand it, it can significantly increase your chance of success.
Q: What does the future hold for you?
A: I’m having fun and it’s really fulfilling to be purchasing some local businesses, like Clark Pools and Spas.
It’s been really rewarding so I hope to do more of that.
It would probably be dumb of me to bet that Originality was my last business to start. I’m sure there will be something else.
Q: When you’re not working, what are your hobbies?
A: I do ski coaching every weekend throughout the winter. It’s a ton of fun.
I have three kids. The reason we moved back is to do all the things Collingwood has to offer with our family. I spend as much time as I can doing activities with my family. Winters are heavily focused around skiing, and summers are focused around soccer.
Q: Is there anything else you want people in Collingwood to know about you?
A: If any Collingwood business owners are interested in selling, I’m always interested in having conversations about whether I’m an ideal acquirer.
I’m happy to have that conversation.
For our feature People of Collingwood, we speak with interesting people who are either from or are contributing to the Collingwood community in some way, letting them tell their own stories in their own words. This feature runs on CollingwoodToday every weekend. If you’d like to nominate or suggest someone to be featured in People of Collingwood, email [email protected].
