Got insincere flattery?

[firecat]

“But I had an epiphany. You know what all this sycophancy constantly being told you’re right, that you’re brilliant, that every decision is flawless? That sounds an awful lot like being a billionaire.”

[sic - perhaps the grammatical error is to show the writer is not an AI]

"The Secret Tool AI Uses to Seduce You: Explained," by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis

I use AI to get answers to simple questions and I hate when the bot addresses me personally. I hate it possibly to an irrational degree. (Even when someone else shares with me an AI convo they had, I get mad.) Do you use AI for anything and what do you think of this design choice?

Comments

[bitterlawngnome]

I've seen the medical diagnostic tools in action and they are good at "hey human doctor, take a look at x y and z". And I daily use it for simple image editing tasks like removing noise from the background or repairing damage to historic images.

But I'm assuming you mean things like chatgpt? the only place I've found them useful is as an enhanced search tool, where I can look at the sources it's calling on. Everything else is a farrago of fact, fiction, and misdirection.

[firecat]

Yes I can see benefits in medicine, when the results are checked by a person.

Cool to know that it can edit images well.

“Enhanced search tool” — yes that’s a way to describe how I use it. Also when I know I can find the answer but getting the answer through AI is quicker or AI’s answer is easier to copy and paste. (I recently asked it about the order of the James Bond films and got a list that was easier to use than Wikipedia’s list.)

[bitterlawngnome]

oh and also that specific case where I don't even know where to begin with a search query - I just throw a salad of words at it and see if it might come up with that one salient term I might need

Long-time Apple watcher Adam Engst

[jesse_the_k]

is hopeful. He frames AI's utility as moving from search engines to answer engines, providing some pre-Google history along the way.

Re: Long-time Apple watcher Adam Engst

[firecat]

DOGCOW GOES MOOF!

Thanks, I’ll check out the article.

Re: Long-time Apple watcher Adam Engst

[jesse_the_k]

Dogcow rolls on its back and joyfully shows its belly

[firecat]

Interesting, I’ll have to try that sometime.

[bitterlawngnome]

My theory is that word association is what it's good at so ...

[firecat]

Yeah, word association, that’s a good way to think about it.