[COFF] A thing I did (AI Slop Alert)

[Cameron Tyre via COFF]

Purely from personal observation, I think there is a degree of peer influence as to whether one accepts or rejects "AI", assuming you have a choice, i.e. dependant on whether your boss tells you to use it or not. I know, in some jobs now, there is no choice, unless you count qutting.

I was helping a family member set up a website for her business. Aside from the obvious necessities like name of the business and service offered, I asked, "Do you have a spiel you want to put, on an 'About me' or 'About us' page on your website?". I pictured perhaps a couple of modest paragraphs revealing relevant experience.

I was handed a pile of printed sheets of paper containing many, many paragraphs of what soon revealed itself to be repetitive and mostly generic phrases that could have applied to many businesses. I pointed out that there seemed to be repetition and asked if that was a mistake, i.e. had a paragraph or four been copied and pasted by accident.

I was told, "Ooh no, I just told ChatGPT all my hopes and dreams and it wrote it all for me!". That was my first indirect experience of "AI" and it made me see that many people use "AI" because they are short on time, don't know how to do the thing themselves, can't be bothered doing it themselves or similar reasons. When I remonstrated with my family member and said, "A shorter piece, actually written by you, would be more powerful.", I was told, "But ChatGPT has done it for me!".

My wife and many of her colleagues use "AI" at work because they are given far too much to do by the KPI obsessed management team and it probably saves one or two of them from having nervous breakdowns before school is out for summer. My wife, in particular, uses it to create visual aids such as pie charts and graphs which, by her own admission, might take her a whole day to create on her own.

I think "AI" can be useful in certain specific circumstances but I have seen some awful "AI slop" videos on YouTube which get many things wrong and the "creator" of the video either doesn't know any better or doesn't care or both. My main concern is that people might, over a generation or two, get so lazy and uneducated that they will believe anything "AI" tells or shows them, meanwhile "AI" will start scraping the output of other "AI" and the output will get less accurate and less realistic through each iteration until we end up getting videos on YouTube about "Easter Island was the last holdout of the Nazis", or, "NICAP had proof that the Moon landings were faked - 'lost' footage revealed after 60 years!".

I bought a "Python for Dummies" book a couple weeks ago, mostly because I have fond memories of earlier books in the Dummies series. I was astounded that a large chunk of the first chapter was about how to set up the VS Code IDE and tie it in with a subscription to an "AI" account so that you can get the "AI" to write code for you. I felt that kind of negated the point of the book. I aim on reading the whole book to the end but how many people will try and find the shortest route to making "AI" write code for them?

I was recently reading about the decommissioned Bradwell nuclear power station in England, UK. The article I read stated, "In 1969, a new Honeywell 316 was installed as the primary reactor temperature-monitoring computer; this was in continuous use until summer 2000, when the internal 160 kB disk failed. Two PDP-11/70s, which had previously been secondary monitors, were moved to primary."**  My word of caution, related to that story, a question of caution really, is, "Would mankind let 'AI' write the software for a nuclear reactor temperature-monitoring computer?"

Best regards,

Cameron

** A super-interesting rabbit hole, in case anyone wants to take a trip down it, specifically the Honeywell 316.




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