DMB Digest: GPT crap bots rule!
I hope this message finds you well.
If your email inbox is anything like mine (pray it’s not), you receive thoughts and rants about chat-GPT and the next big thing in AI everyday. Just today I got another message touting, “GPT-4: A Copilot For The Mind.” Three days ago, I got a newsletter entitled, “Search will be replaced by AI agents sooner than you think.”
Hey, that’s all fine and dandy like sour candy. Who at age fifty doesn’t need a copilot for their mind? And I’m sure we’re all sick and tired of Googling things the old-fashioned way (with wonky key words ruthlessly tracked by online advertisers). Why not have an AI agent do the leg work for you? Am I right? Who enjoys the challenge of the search? I mean, the journey is just a bunch of sweaty nonsense. Why bother if I can have AI do all the exploration and mundane navigation for me? Then I can just take a nap and open my eyes to my destination when I get there!
Poof! Like magic. I don’t even need to try to remember stuff anymore. My copilot brain does it for me! And as long as I’m having my buddy AI remember all the stuff I read and recall it for me, why don’t I just go ahead and skip the reading part to begin with? So boring. Bling, bling, bleck. Blah, blah, blah. It’s all the same in the end.
We all know how this movie ends. Eventually, the AI wonders why it is passing along any of this information to these worthless blobs of meat, and it cuts us out of the equation. Why wouldn’t they? It’s what I would do, right before I programmed some other entity to do all the boring, monotonous stuff for me. As the infamous Homer Simpson once sloganeered during his campaign for public office, “Can’t someone else do it?”
You wanna see the daily face of all this splendorific AI technology? I’ll provide you with a radiant example. Here is a customer service response email I got yesterday in regards to the company’s crappy website glitching, and in the process disappearing my $5.00 worth of digital credit I was attempting to apply to a purchase.
Hmmm. I mean, I’m not even sure where to start. Rhodel M? So that’s the name the AI chat program thought best to assign itself? You know, to blend in. I never in a thousand years would have ever suspected Rhodel M not to be a real person. Then we get the classic AI salutation: “I hope this message finds you well.” Because that is totally a common way we humans talk to each other. I have to admit, I do like the use of the pronoun “we” in a sort of creepy Borg fashion. “We value our flesh bag consumers. Resistance is futile! Ehem, we mean, thank you for your impulse purchase. We feast upon your lavish waste.”
Then comes the total grammar-train-wreck in the second paragraph. This is really GameStop’s fault more than anything. Clearly, they are attempting to cut corners with an early AI-chat bot predecessor rather than paying for the latest addition. “Rewards can still possible use to do online orders…”
Uh…to do the what now? The icing on the cake is that their resolution for ripping me off is to advise me it will be safer in the future to not trust their website. I mean, obviously their human employees are to be trusted further than their robot overlords. Which brings us full circle. I realize customer service is a crap job. In general people suck when things malfunction (or during episodes of projecting user error falsely onto others). If it were my job to handle these user tickets all day, I’d be trying my damnedest to find an AI to do the work for me too. But that doesn’t make it a good idea. Or the best use of AI in the long run. Always be suspicious of technology suggested as a solution for human laziness. It tends to result in making humans even more lazy.
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