Practice · 2023–now · AI Present
Shadow AI / paste-into-ChatGPT
Prod data into consumer chat because the approved tool is slow. GDPR with better autocomplete.
Why Shadow AI / paste-into-ChatGPT became a costly fad
Shadow AI failed as policy-by-hope because convenience beats blocked portals. It sticks as a governance problem wherever sanctioned tooling lags real workflows. The costly fad was pretending training slides stop paste; the durable fix is usable approved paths and data classification that engineers can follow under deadline.
Cost of the fad
What Shadow AI / paste-into-ChatGPT cost
Employees routed tickets, logs, and customer PII through consumer chat before InfoSec finished procurement. Compliance scramble followed the demos.
Case studies
Patterns
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AI pair programming
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Practice · 2018–2025
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Practice · 2023–now
Prompt injection as afterthought
Ship the chatbot, bolt on security later — OWASP's new category, same old afterthought.
$ Customer-facing chatbots shipped with tool access and "security in phase two." Indirect injection via docs and tickets became the new XSS.
Practice · 2023–now
Local inference
Run the model on your laptop or rack. Privacy, cost control, and the refusal to send every token to a vendor.