I’ve noticed more and more that LinkedIn posts about ai come in two very distinct flavours:
- I love ai and use it for everything
- I detest ai and I won’t use it for anything, and will actively turn it off or not use a product or service that has it
Now, I probably fall into the latter for most things, and there’s a reason for this. ai is a lens. It looks at tasks, say summarising a document, through a lens. It’s not a lens I know or can know, and therefore I am less trustful of it’s summary. I can read it myself and get a summary in a reasonably short time and I also get the context around that summary. I can know it.
Where ai (by which I mean machine learning) is great is where you’re needing to find the equivalent of a needle in a haystack and to know if it’s hay or the needle. It’s brute force summarising, as it were. I don’t care how it’s done, it’ll find the needle and present it to me.
Sometimes I need both. I need to find the needle quickly, but also need to know that I can find the needle myself – or better, understand how the needle was found – as I can build out context from this. An example would be video call transriptions. I don’t find them helpful on their own, but with notes I make about body language and cadence, etc, I can build a really interesting picture about what’s important. ai, as yet, cannot. I suspect it won’t. Certainly in my lifetime. Because it’s good at using the past to determine its output and not very good at understanding the present and all its nuances and then using these to add colour.
It’s quantitative not qualitative.
Oh, and the reason I don’t want to use ai in products and actively turn it off? They’re using it to feed their machine, even when they say they aren’t. I can’t trust them. I mean, it’s not like tech companies have proven themselves to be trusted, right?