Summarizing text — probably not primarily books — is one area that I think might be more useful. It is a task that many people do spend time doing. Maybe it’s combining multiple reports from subordinates, say, and then pushing a summary upwards.
The problem I have with summarizing text is that it does often miss key features. Without using books as an example, for my work we have a knowledge base that we reference for things. We work in all 50 states, and the laws vary, and the AI will very frequently quote the wrong state’s laws, or tell us to do something possible in one state, but not in others. Could this get better? Maybe, but I’m not super convinced.
The rest of the comment isn’t exactly disagreeable, I’m just also concerned of the social costs. Not just for things like lost jobs, those always happen when new things come in. It sucks, but we do move on, and entire professions have been forgotten because they were automated long ago. A lot of the opinions I have about AI are a bit reactionary, but at the same time headlines like “AI chatbot talks child into suicide, and it’s really easy to get it to do that” is. Y’know. Not a great thing to read, especially when the tech is steeped in controversy in all directions. Copyright (which isn’t an issue they’ll ever get past without massive changes, and scrapping entire models), bringing smaller sites down with extensive scraping, job loss, environmental concerns (however overblown they may or may not be), increasing utility bills for areas, leading to the RAM shortage… It’s a whole lot of bad stuff, all for something that, largely, people don’t want, and is being forced into every aspect of our daily lives.
All this for something that people largely don’t want. I don’t even remember this many people being this anti-internet/computers. At worst I remember articles talking about how it’d be a passing fad. Granted I was a kid when the internet was really kicking off, but I was in an area where people were still mad about seatbelts, so I’d imagine at least a handful would’ve hated the internet if it were even half as bad as how little AI is wanted anywhere outside of CEO offices.
I’m sure AI will find some use-cases, I just don’t think they’re going to be user-facing at all, mostly due to how much they cost vs how much people will be willing to pay.
The problem I have with summarizing text is that it does often miss key features. Without using books as an example, for my work we have a knowledge base that we reference for things. We work in all 50 states, and the laws vary, and the AI will very frequently quote the wrong state’s laws, or tell us to do something possible in one state, but not in others. Could this get better? Maybe, but I’m not super convinced.
The rest of the comment isn’t exactly disagreeable, I’m just also concerned of the social costs. Not just for things like lost jobs, those always happen when new things come in. It sucks, but we do move on, and entire professions have been forgotten because they were automated long ago. A lot of the opinions I have about AI are a bit reactionary, but at the same time headlines like “AI chatbot talks child into suicide, and it’s really easy to get it to do that” is. Y’know. Not a great thing to read, especially when the tech is steeped in controversy in all directions. Copyright (which isn’t an issue they’ll ever get past without massive changes, and scrapping entire models), bringing smaller sites down with extensive scraping, job loss, environmental concerns (however overblown they may or may not be), increasing utility bills for areas, leading to the RAM shortage… It’s a whole lot of bad stuff, all for something that, largely, people don’t want, and is being forced into every aspect of our daily lives.
All this for something that people largely don’t want. I don’t even remember this many people being this anti-internet/computers. At worst I remember articles talking about how it’d be a passing fad. Granted I was a kid when the internet was really kicking off, but I was in an area where people were still mad about seatbelts, so I’d imagine at least a handful would’ve hated the internet if it were even half as bad as how little AI is wanted anywhere outside of CEO offices.
I’m sure AI will find some use-cases, I just don’t think they’re going to be user-facing at all, mostly due to how much they cost vs how much people will be willing to pay.