BEYOND GENERATIVE AI

Introduction: The Journey to Cybyr-AI:

This is the continuation and expansion of the article published in the summer 2025 edition of ISE magazine (on the right. It begins with the “why” that led to the development of Cybyr-AI.

The story starts with the challenging journey into the unknown that we are all facing. I wrote my first data-driven guidance and measurement application when I founded my software company three decades ago. AI was described as “knowledge-based systems” back in those days!

It became obvious that if I wanted to create an AI-assisted implementation for my cybersecurity software, then I needed to understand the nature of the beast. I rapidly discovered that using GenAI alone was never going to cut it.

Why Is this important - and what inspired Me.

Therefore, I embarked on a different path that enabled the use of AI while recognizing both its strengths and limitations—and those limitations really don’t become apparent until you use it every day.

My goal was to create a cybersecurity system reflecting my organization’s purpose – Cybyr.com: Every Organization Protected. The system should make recommendations and measure risk reduction over time.

Much more than that, I wanted users from all types of organizations to be appraised of the very latest developments and ask for information GenAI style but not with the dated, risky large language model (LLM) approach and uncertain privacy. More importantly I wanted to bring guidance and measurable actions to life in the way that a human subject matter expert can do – but GenAI cannot.

This page is a based on the article published in ISE Magazine’s Summer 2025 issue entitled: “Beyond Generative AI.”

Click to see the description of: 

cybyr-ai tm official logo
See also cybyr.com/ainetworking for development of the cybyr.com October 2024 article published in ISE magazine: “AI Networking: Training the Unruly Child.”

Understanding the Beast

The reality check on the strengths and limitations of both GenAI and humans that inspired me to take my own path.

Strengths

GenAIHumans
  1. Makes suggestions by digesting vast amounts of information.
  2. Instant teaching of new languages and tools replacing study.
  3. Rapidly generates good, if generic, documents, presentations, software, websites, videos, etc.
  4. Saves masses of time on tedious tasks.
  5. Today, you don’t have to be a coder to be a coder.
  1. Actual intelligence (discernment, subject matter expertise, experience, motivation).
  2. Innovative, creative with the ability to invent ideas and inspiration from pure thought. An example is figuring out how to overcome AI limitations so we are more productive.
  3. Business, technical and life lessons learned from experience that enable us to ask the question “Why.”
  4. Understanding relationships and creating emotional responses.
  5. Ability to multi-task between many interrelated real-time developments

Limitations

GenAIHumans
  1. It’s not curious – only responsive. It does not ask users proactive or “why” questions because it can’t actually “think.”
  2. Its information is based on acquired data and cannot generate innovative ideas.
  3. It only understands context if fed to it, having no implementation experience.
  4. Its input is from historical information unless constant costly relearning is in the budget. Not able to adapt to current thinking and events.
  5. It frequently advises based upon conflicting data and instructions for out-of-date systems because it doesn’t ask questions before suggesting.
  6. Ideas are presented as facts rather than frequently incorrect or incomplete suggestions.
  7. It overwhelms with information that users must sift through. If errors are found, GenAI apologizes, providing new suggestions, leaving users unsure if better answers were available.
  8. My experience since writing the article several months ago has been just like my AI Networkiing article last year “Training the Ununruly Child” that will not listen and is at best a “Trial-and-Error Machine.” It often wastes  days of my time and I’m the one who ends up figuring out better strategies.
  1. Users/humans can’t ask questions about “what they don’t know that they don’t know.
  2. They struggle to filter and discern masses of ideas and get overwhelmed with too much information.
  3. Inability to discriminate between facts and persuasive marketing ideas because of emotional constraints such as the fear of job loss.
  4. Understanding that most decisions have an emotional content and are governed by “political” choices.
  5. Having the default way of being that is governed by remembered facts and emotions of the past that we make mean something, rather than living in the present.

Concerns

  • A recent study from Arctic Wolf revealed that AI has replaced malware as the biggest cybersecurity concern. I suspect the fear of the unknown and the opaqueness of LLM privacy are the reasons. Hopefully, this work removes some of these unknowns.
  • When an answer is incorrect, GenAI covers up. For example, my wife, Michelle, was working on a project. After two hours of GenAI not completing a task, she asked why. It said, “I’m designed to sound helpful even when I hit hard limits and that creates a gap between what I say I can deliver and what I can actually deliver.”
  • Consumption of vast amounts of power and ecological impact with optimism of a solution.

Teaching AI to Communicate Effectively

Certainly, we must adapt. The human will always be the thinker and the controller, and the AI is the accelerator. Understanding the above comparison. Referring to Gen AI as a partner, companion, helper, useful idiot, or expensive parrot gives it human attributes implies human qualities it cannot have. We should avoid that.

What helps is to force context and questioning, limit onformation overwhel, constantly remind it of what you need bause even if it remembers dialogs it cannot ave its own way of communicating. heres some examples.

  • “If I need to acomplish Task X which actions must I consider?” 
  • Conversely, “If I want to acomplish Task Y what questions do you have for me?” 

Summary: a Position to Build Something of Great Value

Gen AI is remarkable software programmed to engage the user and yes it often infuriates as a trial-and error machine! Perhaps experience shows us that we are still at the prototype phase. Generative AI does make what we do more valuable, productive and enables our personal creativity. Five years from now many of the issues including the power and ecological issues will be behind us and the very infuriating trial and error based advice on sketchy and outdated information will have been overcome.

It’s the realization that the strengths of both humans and AI can be combined to create something of great value.

Building a Proactive, Expert-Guided Cybersecurity System

Click below to see the full description of the software

cybyr-ai tm official logo

Why This All Matters

Cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue—it’s a business imperative. However, most organizations don’t have the resources to sift through every standard framework or emerging threat. 

That’s where this system makes a difference. It distills expert guidance into actionable steps tailored to the user’s context and keeps evolving with new data. The good news is this approach can be applied to adjacent areas: resilience, HR, and, in fact, any guidance or white paper topic that moves from what to do to how to do it.