I’ve been told that AI stands for Artificial intelligence, is that like I can’t believe its not butter, because that is not butter and I am beginning to think AI is not intelligence. OAN’s Brooke Mallory wrote an article this week about AI use in Carl’s Jr, Hardee’s, Del Taco, and Checkers. Presto Automation offers a chatbot that always remembers to upsell and has been lauded for taking over 95% of the drive through orders. I go through the drive through and order a chicken soft taco and Presto I get a fish quesadilla. Wait what? That’s right, the company now says that “off-site agents” assist with more than 70% of the purchases to ensure that the AI system does not malfunction or input the wrong items. The employees are often based in the Philippines. I wonder what rate they are paying them per hour. What in the world is going on? First EV energy is going bankrupt and now AI can’t get my burger and fries order, correct? Presto is currently used in more than 400 locations in the US and plans to triple. Now hold it right there Jean-Claude, their stock is down 60% this year. Always check your bag before you leave the drive thru is my advice. It seems that AI stands for another inaccuracy.
These mistakes at a fast-food drive thru hit a little too close to home for me so I started looking for some other mistakes that AI has made lately. TechCo’s Aaron Drapkin has a great listing of oops by AI, and here is something from May 2023.
“A Texas professor fails his entire class after running their essays through ChatGPT, which told him that they had been created using artificial intelligence.
However, it transpires that the chatbot’s response is in fact a hallucination – ChatGPT is unable to distinguish between text generated by AI and text generated by human beings in this way. In fact, a lot of tools that claim to be able to perform accurate AI content detection actually struggle to do so.”
How about October 2023 when a deep fake AI audio clip of UK Labour Party Leader Sir Keir Starmer verbally abusing his staff, before it was discovered it was a ruse.
How about September when MSN News uses AI to generate articles called the late NBA player Brandon Hunter useless. Cross him off then. He’s dead. It sounds like AI stands for Always insensitive.
Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian talks about the unavoidable mistakes with AI, “In March, Microsoft released Copilot, a chatbot based on ChatGPT that’s embedded as an assistant in Office 365 business applications. It’s called Copilot because it was never intended to perform unattended or unreviewed work, and it offers refences for its work, according to Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for modern work and business applications at Microsoft.
“Especially on specifics like numbers, when Copilot spits out ‘You grew 77% year-over-year in this category,’ it will give you a reference: this is from this report,” Spataro said. “If you don’t see a reference, you’ll be very sure it’s making something up.’”
Is this so bad? It is basically making all of us be copy editors of everything we see and read. Oh, you mean the generation that doesn’t know anything is vulnerable to untruths and fake news? Go on, C Thomas tell us more? I have been infuriated recently as I see the huge array of errors on news sites, homepages, and advertisements. I operate in an infuriated state quite often so I didn’t think nothing about it until it kept happening and kept happening. Players were on the wrong sports teams, historical facts were mistaken, cities were in the wrong state. I was beginning to think I was either developing a pettifogging personality or eating a peyote button muffin and I was living in the bizzarro-world. I expected George Costanza to order a chicken salad on rye and a cup of tea. I can start to tell which sites are using AI because it looks like third grade work. Have we really run so short of workers in this country that we are lowering the bar to third grade work to create content or is it that the average intelligence of an American is at the third-grade level. We are worried about AI taking over the world? What are they going to do it with a bunch of Crayola’s?
At first, I was confused. I just thought the world had grown idiots at a faster pace than I realized, but it was actually assisted idiocy. Maybe that is what AI stands for, Assisted Idiocy? Before I gave in to my gut reaction to the third-grade world of generative AI, I said to myself let’s use our lessons from the CTPC and take a look at this more closely. So I did some digging and found that PCmag’s K. Thor Jensen was already ahead of me. He found 10 of the biggest flaws with generative AI “If we were to view AI algorithms as though they were living beings, they’re kind of like dogs—they really want to make you happy, even if that means leaving a dead raccoon on the front porch.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, so I read on, “Generative AI needs to create a response to your query, even if it isn’t capable of giving you one that is factual or sensible. We’ve seen this in examples from ChatGPT, Bard, and others: If the AI doesn’t have enough actual information in its knowledge base, it fills in gaps with stuff that sounds like it could be correct, according to its algorithm.”
Jensen gives some other examples like AI is out of date, and I thought it just got here? Archie Bunker is out of date, you quote that character and you will be fired and hung by your entrails by a group of blue haired Billie Eilish fans. AI just got here so how can it be out of date, but he explains that it is basically scraping a data set and like your Iphone, no update no work no more. It also commits copyright infringement, and I had heard a bit about this during the SAG strike. I suppose there are only so many words in the language and there is a limited number of combinations so technically it could write everything which could include things that had already been written. I suppose it is even easier to copy music. Just start with one note and then go from there. Maybe that is what AI stands for, Autotune Improvement.
His article mentioned some other issues like AI can lie but we already knew about hallucinations when we mentioned the court case where the lawyers used AI and the damn thing just made up court cases. I’m not shocked it could lie, I’m shocked people think that it couldn’t. I think the biggest risk is AI blurs the line between what is real and what isn’t. Like Sir Keir Starmer in the UK, we live in a world where you get fired first and exonerated later. The retraction by the media is never covered with the gusto of the hit piece that brings down their tabloid prey. We live in a world where people can write things every day that are just untrue, hell people can read this very thing and say it is unture and I don’t even have an agenda or an ax to grind. Well other than those lazy web sites with the wrong information, how hard is it to get a player’s team right?
What I didn’t realize was quite how expensive this technology was. I had heard that every query on ChatGPT cost $11 or something outrageous and I wondered if that was made up by ChatGPT as well, but it is actually expensive to use these algorithms and boy do they use up a lot of energy to run. There are lots of GPUs and chips and electrical connectors and switches and soldering needed to keep these things together. Then I realized their inherent usefulness.
We live in a society that doesn’t want to educate itself, that only wants to be entertained, and doesn’t have the energy to seek out truth and see if what they are reading is valid or not. Lots of people don’t know anything, but they can Google anything so they think that is a substitute for knowledge. It’s a wonderful substitute for research perhaps, but learning is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. AI can do both, but it has no idea if what it has presented to the public is right or wrong. It can draw a picture or write a paper because in the subjective it might be acceptable or even terrific, but in a world where accuracy is needed, it is unreliable. It is merely a parrot. It can repeat and mimic quite well, but that doesn’t mean it is thinking, it is processing. We have our best brains working on something that will allow the dumbest brains to not think, think about that.
If I was a blind person and I came to a street crossing where there was a policeman in the middle of the road directing traffic, I would ask for help. Sir, I am blind and I can’t see your wavings and stoppings, but I do recognize your voice so please tell me when to cross. If every time I ventured out into the street a truck ran me over eventually I would stop asking the policeman for help because it is not helpful. If it tells me something that I know to be incorrect, then the credibility of it is going to decrease with me to the point where I can’t trust it and if I can’t trust it, then I won’t use it. It is just like the US dollar and so it is with AI. AI is about trust and the American society is very trusting right now. They drive their Teslas while reading a book, they have lane assist so their car can save them from driving into the other lane, and they rely on prophylactics to keep from having babies. They can’t be bothered to learn to read or write or ‘rithmetic because they have a phone that can do math. I think society is perfectly prepared to accept AI. I won’t though, I will have my nose in a book somewhere because I prefer Random House to simply random. AI can write volumes and quickly but unlike something written by an author, AI will often write something unintentional. I will stick to reading authors and their AI, As Intended. Read a book and support an author.
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
On this date in history…381 years ago today, New Zealand was discovered by Dutch navigator Abel Tasman.
Perhaps old Abel saw a waddle, a waddle of penguins that is. A group of penguins is called a waddle and New Zealand is home to several species of the sharp dressed bird.
Also born on this date Alvin York, one of the most celebrated and bravest US soldiers during World War I. His patrol of 17 came under attack and he killed over 20 enemy soldiers and captured 132 enemy soldiers. He shunned publicity due to his religious faith after the war choosing to work with underprivileged kids in his home state of Tennessee, but Howard Hawks made a movie about him in 1941 and Gary Cooper played the lead.