Rosencrantz2
4d ago
Well put. Writing changes our ideas and forces us to bring thought, intuition and word into alignment. All three can change in the process. If you don't go through that usually painful process I am sceptical you are getting an ai to accurately express your thoughts. I think it's much more likely you are allowing the ai to determine what you think. Unwritten thoughts are just too inchoate for us to accurately say of an ai response "oh yes, that's exactly how I would have put it".
Rosencrantz2
8d ago
No, it's ambiguous and how you'd interpret it would depend on the speaker and context. It could be said by someone who absolutely loves pop music. A true opera lover might well hate shitty opera more than anyone.
Rosencrantz2
8d ago
I don't think your example works? I like pop music, but I hate shitty pop music. I guess if I only ever say 'shitty' and 'pop music' together that would be strange, not sure that's the case with masculinity and the left though depends who you are referring to.
Getting LLM's to do banal customer service jobs without adding new and Kafkaesque confusion will wait on the Zermelo–Fraenkel of gas meters. Who will create it? Perhaps the newly unemployed pure mathematicians will be hired to create rigorous formalizations of daily life.
I guess the theory is pretty much this! People will figure out how to automate the production of good training data from company files and ever increasing quantities of video, audio and chat logs. Then in x years, the ai will have learned how to problem solve edge cases like yours from precedent.
It seems inconceivable that all service companies will be able to do things well enough via their existing humans plus the unemployed mathematicians to train ai to be actually competent though. More likely the ai will end up being trained to emulate all the bad traits of service desks as well as the good, and the mathematicians will discover themselves brought low by bureaucracy like the rest of us.
Especially because the company's most pressing incentive is to get some form of ai talking users in circles for an hour to use up time before a competent person becomes available.
Rosencrantz2
19d ago
In general I don't think I've seen a rigorous argument supporting the idea that "AI just needs X more months to develop Y capabilities and it'll have Z real world effect", when it seems that nobody really understands what capabilities are missing from the current models that are currently preventing them from having major real-world impact in the first place.
I keep thinking about this in the field of advertising, where AI is just as good at many creatives at coming up with ideas – and most clients don't care sufficiently about or cannot see the quality gap that talent creates anyway.
I think the difference is that even if a creative gets their ideas from AI, the job isn't just writing down some ideas. Creatives then have to convince the rest of the team, who have to present the idea to a client, who has to buy it believing that their agency is ready to produce it and genuinely likes what they propose (or at least thinks it will look good in their reel). But current AIs aren't build to convince people, even though they are pretty good at making a case for something if you ask them to. Because you have to ask them to persuade you, the efficacy of their persuasion capabilities is inherently lower.
Somewhere along the way (and I have not articulated this properly yet), I have come to the conclusion that today's obedient AIs do not have the skin in the game necessary to contribute to certain types of group dynamics which are at the core of many business endeavours. For this reason I think a different form of more autonomous AI is going to be needed to realise the job replacements possible, and we may need AIs with stable personalities that develop track records in specific fields and must compete against humans 'in the open', before they can take on a whole swathe of white collar jobs that on the surface look eminently replaceable already.
Rosencrantz2
26d ago
This post is poetry.
I don't buy this. There are cases of "I'll know it when I see it", sure, but a lot more of people thinking they know exactly what they think, but then finding out, the more they use language to talk and write about it, that they never knew in the first place.
As an example from my experience, clients in advertising often think they know what they want. Then they see it and realise they don't. The process goes on until they arrive at something they are happy with. Is it what was in their head originally? Basically never.
I gently suggest you introspect when this happens next. Are you really perceiving a match between what is written and what you already think? Or are you just intuitively nodding along at something without it touching the sides? Consider what is the difference between those two things. When you are on the verge of putting a smart thought into words, do you know with confidence that you already have a smart thought? Or does it sometimes feel disappointing when it is on the page?
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