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The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

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Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#41

Post by lowglow »

aresant wrote: post #4

I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails. X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you." Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings " You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning". My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party…

It's completely disingenuous and is riding on the AI hype train. I've never once ran into a chat "bot" that wasn't human. It's ridiculous, completely misleading, and frankly waters down any real startups working towards that future.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#42

Post by mmatty »

aresant wrote: post #4

I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails. X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you." Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings " You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning". My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party…

Meekan is a Slack bot that's actually 100% AI, takes natural language commands, and is used by 10's of thousands of real people. The Median time to schedule a meeting with Meekan is 53 seconds, which means he's delivering real value. Not trying to be an AGI, the bot looks in everyone's calendars and prefs and suggests the best time to meet. By that, he's trimming the huge decision tree into a small, ranked suggestion list that's easy to grasp and decide upon. An assistive tool that saves tons of time and frustrations. Nothing less.

[note:I'm the product manager at Meekan, https://meekan.com]

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#43

Post by dunkelheit »

exolymph wrote: post #38
yummyfajitas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've correctly identified the problem x.ai really solves: I want a secretary but I'm not that important. The ridiculous thing is that doodle.com already solved this problem in a much less sexy way - just click the time you want. Problem solved in 10 seconds (vs minutes with this dumb bot).

This is my beef with chatbots in general -- it is the rare conversational interface that has any advantage over a GUI beyond its novelty.

Isn't it ironic that chatbots are touted as a more natural, conversational interface when they are basically CLIs? Back in the day GUI adoption over CLI was driven by conviction that desktop, drag and drop and point and click are more natural metaphors.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#44

Post by PascalsMugger »

mmatty wrote: post #42
aresant wrote: post #4

I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails. X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you." Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings " You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning". My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party…

Meekan is a Slack bot that's actually 100% AI, takes natural language commands, and is used by 10's of thousands of real people. The Median time to schedule a meeting with Meekan is 53 seconds, which means he's delivering real value. Not trying to be an AGI, the bot looks in everyone's calendars and prefs and suggests the best time to meet. By that, he's trimming the huge decision tree into a small, ranked suggestion…

Just curious, but why do you refer to it as "he", especially in this context where you are touting it as an actual non-human? Not to single you out, I see people referring to all these other things as (usually female) "her" and it just unsettles me to think that people are anthropomorphizing these things so much.

On a related tangent, often these same people will refer to animals as "it", too, which is even more curious. A living being with an actual gender doesn't rate a gendered pronoun, yet a piece of software does.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#45

Post by xerophyte12932 »

lowglow wrote: post #41
aresant wrote: post #4

I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails. X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you." Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings " You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning". My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party…

It's completely disingenuous and is riding on the AI hype train. I've never once ran into a chat "bot" that wasn't human. It's ridiculous, completely misleading, and frankly waters down any real startups working towards that future.

> I've never once ran into a chat "bot" that wasn't human.

Well that's absurd. Siri? Eliza? There are multitudes of actual chat bots out there. They usually good to fool a good lot of the general population. But the tapestry unravels with just a little bit of effort if you know what to ask.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#46

Post by mmatty »

PascalsMugger wrote: post #44
mmatty wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meekan is a Slack bot that's actually 100% AI, takes natural language commands, and is used by 10's of thousands of real people. The Median time to schedule a meeting with Meekan is 53 seconds, which means he's delivering real value. Not trying to be an AGI, the bot looks in everyone's calendars and prefs and suggests the best time to meet. By that, he's trimming the huge decision tree into a small, ranked suggestion…

Just curious, but why do you refer to it as "he", especially in this context where you are touting it as an actual non-human? Not to single you out, I see people referring to all these other things as (usually female) "her" and it just unsettles me to think that people are anthropomorphizing these things so much. On a related tangent, often these same people will refer to animals as "it", too, which is even more curi…

True. We started out trying to limit the conversation to just scheduling-related topics. But very early on we realized that since this is all happening in a conversation, people expect him to be able to carry some smalltalk - because when he doesn't, he's perceived as stupid - he can't even say "hello" properly, how can he possibly do scheduling? (if this is interesting, I wrote about it a few month ago in much more detail: https://medium.com/building-the-robot-assistant/cheating-on-... )

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#47

Post by duckingtest »

zipwitch wrote: post #32
taneq wrote: post #30

"But for now, the companies are largely powered by people, clicking behind the curtain and making it look like magic." Does this remind anyone else of the anonymous voice actors behind the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer?

Yes. Here come the ractors. Just one of a great many points of correspondence between the present day and cyberpunk dystopian fiction. (Technically, I think Diamond Age is post-cyberpunk.) Over at Naked Capitalism, the daily news rundown has a section titled The Jackpot.

What was dystopian about Diamond Age? While it wasn't explicitly utopian, the world is much closer to utopia than dystopia. Certainly better than current reality.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#49

Post by wingerlang »

morgante wrote: post #14
twinkletwinkle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two parties to an email conversation. If one person is using "Amy" and adds her to the conversation, the other person may not fully understand the implications. Especially since their marketing tries hard to blur the lines.

To the outside party, Amy seems like a competent secretary. I'm not sure why they would assume "she" isn't.

Even if that is the case this third party would then assume that the secretary is "with" the other person. Not some other person that no one have ever talked to or met or etc.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#50

Post by burtmacklin »

dunkelheit wrote: post #43
exolymph wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my beef with chatbots in general -- it is the rare conversational interface that has any advantage over a GUI beyond its novelty.

Isn't it ironic that chatbots are touted as a more natural, conversational interface when they are basically CLIs? Back in the day GUI adoption over CLI was driven by conviction that desktop, drag and drop and point and click are more natural metaphors.

As usual, what's old is new again. Makes sense given that user interfaces and "styles" of software are just like styles in anything else (ie: fashion) -- they come and go and come back again.

Fast forward another 3 - 7 years and users will be wondering at the marvels of a chatbot where one can simply click on the picture of the action they'd like it to perform! Perhaps entire menus of actions will be presented, in horizontal or vertical strips inside the chat interface... these actions will of course be represented by hieroglyphs expertly designed to convey just what they do and no more, to as cross-cultural an audience as possible. Maybe we'll call them icons or something.

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