I am annoyed with many “AI” things this morning, so this is a rant with no pretense of objectivity or overall wisdom.
AI call directors are terrible. Especially Intuit’s.
Here I will just reprint a rant that I posted to both qoto and Twitter; I was so annoyed!
Wow, #Intuit #TurboTax is just awful.
I mean, I do know that they’ve been lobbying against tax simplification in the US for years, because it would cut into their business, and that’s pretty evil.
But their customer service is apparently also terrible!
I need to file a particular New York State #tax form this year, and apparently they just don’t support it, and aren’t planning to.
Which seems to mean that I would have to manually enter the data, which seems to mean that I couldn’t then e-file or get their correctness guarantee. And if one uses software to prepare the return, one is required by law to e-file!
So it seems like I just can’t use their software at all. Which is maybe good!
When I tried to call them to ask if they support the form, their robot call director asked me what I wanted, mis-heard me, and insisted on knowing whether I wanted the irrelevant information it had found sent by text or email; “no” was not a valid choice.
Then it insisted on knowing my last name, but failed to understand me when I tried to pronounce or spell it (and I have a pretty ordinary voice, and not all that unusual a name!) and eventually it said goodbye and HUNG UP ON ME when it couldn’t.
I had to call back and pretend that its incorrect guess at my last name was correct, before it would pass me to a representative. And the first thing the human rep (who was very nice!) asked me was for my first and last name, so the whole robot torture conversation was useless as well as annoying.
I think they’re just trying to get people to give up on calling them.
Which in my case probably means switching to #freetaxusa which is cheaper anyway, and does support the forms that I need.
Sheesh!
I hate this Roomba (at least while it’s running).
Leaving aside the fact that it’s a mobile Internet-attached camera that could almost certainly be accessed by random hax0rs in Kekistan, and may already be sending all sorts of images of private life to iRobot / Amazon / the NSA, it’s just annoying.
It has an app of course, but for some unaccountable reason the app is rather terrible. For a long time it offered not much more than the little “CLEAN” button on the robot does; no way to tell it to avoid certain areas or do a certain room right now, let alone a Direct Drive mode where you could just pilot it around vacuuming (which I would have thought would have been the Minimum Viable Product or whatever the kids are calling it these days), no insights into what was going on in the little beggar’s mind that makes it buzz around in the front hallway for half of its runtime and pay only cursory attention to any actual room. Lately it’s been enhanced somewhat, so you can see a version of it’s internal map, tell it to do a certain area, and a few other things.
But it still went under my chair this morning while I was having my coffee, and got into some kind of infinite loop at the edge of the nest of power and data lines off the side of the chair where it doesn’t really need to go at all. It sat there trying to charge forward and running into something with a loud whir, turning slightly right, whirring again, turning back slightly left, whirring again, repeat forever and ever, with loud irritating whirs every time. I gave it a slight nudge to try to get it away, and it faffed about a little and then charged back into the same corner again, whirring as loud as ever.
Why isn’t there a “don’t try the same thing more than a dozen times” feature in the thing? Maybe because it’s some black-box AI that can’t be explicitly programmed not to do certain things, but just does whatever comes out of the mysterious tangle of weights and things. And maybe because they couldn’t be bothered to add that because it hasn’t made it into a sprint yet. Who knows!
But it’s really annoying. It’s chased me out of my chair (again) and I’m sitting in the living room where it isn’t currently whirring in annoying ways.
Fekking thing.
Look how fast it can be wrong!
All of the excitement about LLMs also has lots and lots of really annoying properties. Having suffered from them for awhile now, I think the basic problem is that LLMs are good at certain small and easily-testable unimportant things that, until now, were good indicators of being good at other things, some of them larger and more important.
In particular, we’re used to only people being good at giving natural-sounding answers to questions in human language, and when someone is especially good at that (“eloquent” or “intelligent” or “legit-sounding”), we are used to that same person being good at saying true things, or being able to write a couple of pages of consistent argument, or caring about the truth of what they are saying.
Large Language Models (like GPT-3 and ChatGPT and Bing’s AI and Google’s Bard and on and on and on) are good at the small things, but bad at the large things. They can give natural-sounding replies to all sorts of questions / statements in human languages, but they have no notion whatever of truth or fact, their input windows are so small that they can’t generate a significant amount of output without losing track of the plot entirely and either going off-topic or contradicting themselves or forgetting their initial instructions and trying to persuade someone to leave their spouse.
So when we see people putting up some trivial “app” that feeds user-input and a paragraph of additional prompt into some random LLM, and billing the result as “AI Medical Evaluation!”, it’s terrifying. (I think that particular one has been taken down since I expressed worries about it on qoto, but there’s still a zillion like say this “Jesus” one, and no doubt scads of other extremely dangerous medical / psychological / legal ones being created every day by people who don’t understand malpractice or law or liability or LLMs.)
And when someone posts to reddit saying “After poring over garbage Google results and documentation that didn’t answer my question for literally an hour, Bing checked the SOURCE CODE and gave me an instant answer. Remind me, why would I ever want to use Google again?”, the obvious reply is that the “instant answer” was in fact wrong, as someone with a name similar to mine pointed out in the reddit thread. (The person says that the answer did eventually lead them to a right answer, but I wonder if it was significantly faster than the “literally an hour” spent in good old search; it certainly wasn’t “instant”.)
And lest anyone think that I have a Conflict of Interest acting here (I do work for Google, but not in the AI or Search departments), I don’t think that Google’s LLMs are any better except in the extremely significant property that they haven’t been released in a form integrated into a general-public web-search tool, in a way that leads people to think their extremely confident answers are in fact reliable.
One of the things I find most irritating in the world are people who are extremely confident and also wrong. So now that we have an entire category of software that is essentially all that way, it’s (again) extremely annoying.
(LLMs are wonderful, as I mentioned the other day, as a sort of crazy friend who you can bounce ideas off of and get bizarre prose to help break a writer’s block, and amuse yourself with fake Elizabethan love poetry or whatever. But in contexts that are framed as likely to produce true statements, they are entirely out of their milieu, and should really just stop. I look forward to the technological breakthroughs that will allow these systems to have usually-true output, but I haven’t seen that yet!)
So anyway! I feel somewhat better now. :) End-rant, comme on dit.
ceoln 