Like rats to the river, we follow AI’s dopey pied piper
It may be big but it is still not clever
Our robot overlords will be thickos.
If there’s one thing worse than humanity being cruelly enslaved by an amoral superior intelligence, it’s when humanity willingly volunteers to be overlorded by morons. And so it is with AI.
Oh dear, I hear you wail, here we go again: not another opinion piece on this bloody topic? Yet more dreary apocalyptic AI predictions from your Friday IT cynic? Absolutely! As regular readers know, I am a registered fortune teller, so it is literally my job to predict the future. Besides, the subject matter remains fertile ground for cultivating adolescent sniggers.
“Heh eheh eheh / uhuh uhuh … He said ‘bot’.”
I’m afraid I was driven to it after a refreshingly honest admission of AI bafflement this week by James Everlegh, the editor of InPublishing, a long-running and respected business magazine for the digital and print content creation industry. Having covered the encroaching and increasingly rapid strides that ChatGPT and its ilk are making into the publishing world over recent years, he had decided to see for himself if AI could be put to good use in-house.
”One of the things we’re trying to do is to automate and shorten some of our workflows,” James recounted on Thursday. “So we created prompts (using Claude) that would take an article prepared in Word and convert it to HTML, automatically applying styling, paragraph and header tags.”
It was all working fine until Claude spontaneously added a hyperlink to an article that hadn’t been in the original text. “It was in effect creating content, when all we wanted it to do was process the content we’d served it with.”
Hopefully this is less of a shock to you than it was to poor James. You and I know that generative AI is a retarded, out-of-control text-maniac intent on smearing knowledge with spontaneous bullshit and fabrications – er, I mean “hallucinations” – but apparently this still comes as a bit of surprise to people who don’t read Autosave is for Wimps.
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