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The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

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Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#31

Post by resu_nimda »

cb18 wrote: post #10

I get that they are trying to use the human responses as a training set. But the scope of these general purpose concierge services mean that what they are going after is damn near Artificial General Intelligence. At least in terms of capability, after-all ordering a burrito and locating an antique skull is a pretty broad capability range. And at what point of accuracy are they aiming for for the systems to run on the…

I've said it before[1] and I'll say it again...the surge of interest in chatbots is premature. We're not even close to solving this problem, because yeah, it has to "learn" and "understand" language, which is equivalent to full intelligence according to some theories.

My guess is, for the foreseeable future, these services will fall into one of two categories:

1. Backed by legions of humans, and thus not that interesting.

2. Trivial at best (ordering pizza with marginally less effort than before, a glorified collection of Slack plugins), disastrous at worst (Microsoft's Tay, the subject of my other post).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11366351

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#32

Post by zipwitch »

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.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#33

Post by jessaustin »

No one here will be shocked at the eventual investor lawsuits, but I was a bit surprised at the "Pain -- Solution" graphic. Unless "Michael" is very senior to "John", he is a complete asshole:

J: I'll be free to meet at these times...

M: Yeah whatever. I can't be arsed to look at my calendar, so talk to my secretary. Oh wait... I'm too cheap to hire a secretary so why don't you talk to this robot instead?

I get it, Lords of the Universe can make you work out the details with their administrative assistant. But then they actually have to employ that person. Is this product pitch aimed at "temporarily embarrassed executives" who envy that sad dominance game?

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#34

Post by yummyfajitas »

jessaustin wrote: post #33

No one here will be shocked at the eventual investor lawsuits, but I was a bit surprised at the "Pain -- Solution" graphic. Unless "Michael" is very senior to "John", he is a complete asshole: J: I'll be free to meet at these times... M: Yeah whatever. I can't be arsed to look at my calendar, so talk to my secretary. Oh wait... I'm too cheap to hire a secretary so why don't you talk to this robot instead? I get it, L…

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).

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#35

Post by jessaustin »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #34
jessaustin wrote: post #33

No one here will be shocked at the eventual investor lawsuits, but I was a bit surprised at the "Pain -- Solution" graphic. Unless "Michael" is very senior to "John", he is a complete asshole: J: I'll be free to meet at these times... M: Yeah whatever. I can't be arsed to look at my calendar, so talk to my secretary. Oh wait... I'm too cheap to hire a secretary so why don't you talk to this robot instead? I get it, L…

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).

Wow, your comment plus TFA's description of the working conditions for the "Heroes" (perhaps the most Orwellian nomenclature I've seen this month): I'm suddenly reminded of an SF short story I must have read decades ago (the title and author of which escape me) in which tourists visiting Vietnam have "fun" in a demented "Vietnam War" theme park, where they get to gun down screaming robot peasants. Inevitably, a gruesome discovery is made... it suffices to say, Benjanun Sriduangkaew would not approve.

In the future, will "I thought it was a computer program behind the interface" be something like "I was just following orders"?

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#36

Post by exolymph »

Funny comment from a Facebook friend: "The meta-turing test: A human trying to convince another human that it is chatting with a computer program. Thankfully a human dumbing itself to chatbot level is far more doable than the opposite." https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/permalink/5...

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#37

Post by exolymph »

seibelj wrote: post #13

The solution is so blindingly obvious: You are creating AI not to replace humans, but to assist humans. If your humans can manage 50 emails per hour, you judge the quality of improvements to the AI on how any more emails per hour they can handle. This is from improving the tools humans use to completely eliminating the human from the equation in certain cases. Then your customers need to rate the quality of the servi…

Agreed. I even think that we'll get closer and closer to general AI the more we use the technology that's ready now to help humans.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#38

Post by exolymph »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #34
jessaustin wrote: post #33

No one here will be shocked at the eventual investor lawsuits, but I was a bit surprised at the "Pain -- Solution" graphic. Unless "Michael" is very senior to "John", he is a complete asshole: J: I'll be free to meet at these times... M: Yeah whatever. I can't be arsed to look at my calendar, so talk to my secretary. Oh wait... I'm too cheap to hire a secretary so why don't you talk to this robot instead? I get it, L…

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.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#39

Post by davnn »

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…

If a third party is CC'ing Amy I would of course send her the unencrypted confidential information and think it's just an AI - they don't look at my data. What the hell.

Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

#40

Post by yummyfajitas »

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.

I generally like command line-esque chatbots. Then again I also like the command line and usually prefer it over a GUI. (I also think that emacs is the best UI ever so I'm perhaps not representative of the typical user.)

The problem with x.ai is that it attempts to replicate the annoying experience of dealing with someone's idiot secretary, not that it's text.

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