AI is terrible at almost everything [a rant]

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.

The expectation of privacy

So yes it’s good to have an open discussion of just how much stuff the government (and private parties) should be able to know and remember about us, and if as Edward Snowden claims the NSA has been lying to Congress about stuff that would be bad and it should stop.

But can we not (and I’m talking to you, U.S. Congress) pretend that we had no idea that this was all going on at all, or that it’s something that the current administration invented?

Congress created and authorized the FISA court in 1978, and gave it extra additional power in 2008; the Supreme Court found in 1979 (Smith v. Maryland) that we have no expectation of privacy in, and so no warrant is even necessary to record, phone numbers that people dial, and by extension other “envelope” and “metadata” information about communications (i.e. everything but the content itself).

(a) Application of the Fourth Amendment depends on whether the person invoking its protection can claim a “legitimate expectation of privacy” that has been invaded by government action. This inquiry normally embraces two questions: first, whether the individual has exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy; and second, whether his expectation is one that society is prepared to recognize as “reasonable.” Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 . Pp. 739-741.

(b) Petitioner in all probability entertained no actual expectation of privacy in the phone numbers he dialed, and even if he did, his expectation was not “legitimate.” First, it is doubtful that telephone users in general have any expectation of privacy regarding the numbers they dial, since they typically know that they must convey phone numbers to the telephone company and that the company has facilities for recording this information and does in fact record it for various legitimate business purposes. And petitioner did not demonstrate an expectation of privacy merely by using his home phone rather than some other phone, since his conduct, although perhaps calculated to keep the contents of his conversation private, was not calculated to preserve the privacy of the number he dialed. Second, even if petitioner did harbor some subjective expectation of privacy, this expectation was not one that society is prepared to recognize as “reasonable.” When petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the phone company and “exposed” that information to its equipment in the normal course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal the information [442 U.S. 735, 736] to the police, cf. United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 . Pp. 741-746.

A few people in Congress and the wider political arena have been worrying about this for some time, and to them I gladly grant the chance to say “I told you so”. But for the rest, who are suddenly grabbing the limelight by pretending this is a Brand New Bad Thing that has just happened and they are decrying, I cry foul. You knew about this, you did nothing about this, in many cases you made this possible and encouraged it. So don’t pretend now that you are a brave opponent…

Pheh!

Seth MacFarlane, Worst Oscar Host Ever

(Well, it’s the obvious headline.)

So last night M mentioned that the Oscars Pre-Game Show was on, saying jokingly that we should be watching it, and I said “Yeah, let’s!”, expecting it to be sort of fun vapid sparkling pop-culture nothingness.

Imagine my surprise.

There’s sometimes a fine and funny and challenging line between being a jerk and parodying jerkiness. Seth MacFarlane was nowhere near that line last night; he was way, way out on the “being a jerk” side.

Parody and satire are great when used against the powerful, or turned inward on ourselves. But I think it’s all too common that someone will think “hey, this stuff is great and gets laffs, but if I use it against the powerful or the audience I might get in trouble, and I’m sure not going to use it on myself, so I’ll just use it on women or minorities or people with funny accents or something”. And that’s the nasty territory that we were in last night.

And somehow the worst thing about the “jokes” marginalizing women, sexualizing a little girl (who was right there in the audience ffs), trivializing eating disorders and abusive relationships, poking fun at people with funny accents, and so on, is that they weren’t funny.

I don’t think I’ll ever look at the talking dog and the baby with the English accent the same way again. (That is this same guy, right?) If nothing else, I’ll have my hegemonic-analysis goggles on…

Dear “Choice Privileges”,

About this email you sent me…

I have a better idea!

How about you freaking bite me?

Please vote you #1 in all categories, eh? Not just some, and not based on how we actually feel or anything? Just because you sent spam asking?

Sheesh.

I cannot understand how anyone could get this piece of insulting stupidity in the mail and not be enraged.

Of course, we know how I am…

:)

(The exciting Freddie Awards, hahaha! Maybe it is parody…)

I want a little lapel pin

I want a little lapel pin that’s officially recognized as meaning:

• Hi there, salesperson!
• I want to give you cash or show you my credit card in exchange for these goods here.
• I do not want to join My Bonus Shopping Reward Points My Way or whatever.
• I realize that it is “absolutely free” except for giving you my personal information, and I still do not want to join it.
• I also do not wish to apply for your store-brand credit card.
• I do not wish or intend to give you my telephone number or driver’s license for any reason at all.
• If had had wanted fries, or a mini-flashlight, or your Special Of The Day, I would have brought it to the counter here.
• And I didn’t.
• In fact I do not wish to be monetized or upsold at in any way.
• I just want to buy this stuff here and leave.
• Seriously.

At least after I’d refused to give the Sears checkout lady my phone number when she discovered I did not belong to My Bonus Consumer Shopping Reward Points My Way, she had the good sense not to ask me for it again when I said I did not have a Sears Card either.

Sheesh!