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I will say I used free GPT for a couple of years and never got this. But also:
How hard is it to put “please ask any relevant follow-up questions” in your prompt? This isn’t wizardry. We were doing this is 2023. Yes, you have to put in a modicum of effort.
And if you have an ounce of curiosity in you then you should really ask it ‘what is a QR code and how does it work’ when you say you want a QR code on your flier!
But for the average person it's being sold as "you can now do all this yourself because the AI will do it all for you". Someone who says "put a QR code in this flyer" assumes that the AI is like a human being that you would ask to do this, and the human would understand what was meant. They don't know that the AI doesn't understand and that you have to be very exact in your prompt, because the sales pitch is "This is your friendly helpful assistant who is a real person too, talk to Claude or Bob or Iris or Sally the chatbot for what you want!"
Giving human names to the machine is all part of the deliberate pitch to humanise the product and sell it as "this can replace a person, now you don't need to pay an artist or a designer or a secretary to do this for you" and that's not true as of yet. Saying people are stupid for not knowing what they have not been told they need to know is dismissive and condescending.
No, I get that, I don't like the marketing campaigns. But at some point you have to pay attention to what you're doing. If you're putting up flyers with a QR code, why haven't you scanned them at least once to know they work? And if you find they don't work, and I'm guessing 'work' here means 'link to your website' then why don't you ask the AI why they're not doing that? And if you've got no idea what you want the QR code to do, why are you asking for a QR code?
Managing AI is very much like managing humans. In both cases half the job is clarifying your thinking and soliciting follow-up questions and checking you're on the same page all the time, and "Well, I know what I want," doesn't work for AI or humans.
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I think you drastically overestimate how well the typical normie can use anything related to computers.
I despise Apple and their products, but their entire schtick (and greatest strength in the market), at least until recently, was making their products and software as idiot-proof and smooth to use as possible. They did so at the cost of gimping it for power users in many ways, but there's a lot more money to be made from normies than power users in most cases.
The various AI companies have a long, long way to go in making stuff idiot-proof for their target audience.
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The selling point in the commercials is that you don't. You can just talk to it like a person. Most normies don't quite get that it's sort of like a brutally autistic person you can just talk to, but you have to carefully phrase everything and anticipate mistakes that would normally come up and be dealt with over an actual conversation. In actual practice, it's less effective at anticipating your needs and problems than the 16 year old girl with a tablet standing outside a Chik'Fil'A.
The marketing for these things has been terrible from the start, I agree. Solving stupid 'problems' in stupid ways, stoking needless terror and antagonism...
And so unnecessary, too. These things percolated perfectly well with no marketing budget whatsoever.
You'll never become a quadrillionaire who rules the world with that kind of attitude.
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