The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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 suddenly CC'ing her (it) into an existing thread.
In many of those cases those threads contain information that I would consider to be confidential.
In some cases the people on the other end work for public companies that I am POSITIVE would not allow for a non-approved human to have access to that information.
I understand the counter argument that x.ai's warehousing this info regardless, but introducing a human under the guise of a blind-AI is unsettling.
It's a disingenuous pitch and should have repercussions if they don't improve their disclosures of what the service is actually doing.
"x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings"
Reality:
"A group of low-paid humans (that may-or-may not have been background checked) will read your emails to help you schedule meetings. They will probably not use this information in any way other than intended."
Those feel like two different products that I would make fundamentally different decisions about.
thats funny, I'll pass the background check and still trade on the inside information, I'm short your house right now
But when you have confidential information in the mix - especially stuff that might have SEC implications - it changes the game.
A few years ago, I did a contract with a company that had a system that deleted all email greater than a year old. While the official answer was that it was "to save space and improve network performance" I suspect the unstated reason was to prevent fishing expeditions.
If your email is being cc'd outside the org and read by actual humans, that introduces some awkward problems.. and may force people to admit the actual reason for the policy. ;)
Most email deletion policies are to protect companies from after-the-fact lawsuits. :-)
[note:I'm the product manager at Meekan, https://meekan.com]
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.
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.
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 their own?
I guess they're thinking they can get pretty good at identifying the easy requests the system can fulfill at 99.9999% accuracy and then shift the harder requests to a human.
At that point it seems like they're just building a system that can distinguish hard requests from easy requests. Sure fulfilling the easy requests with AI is a feat in itself, but how many of those easy requests does it make sense to go through a third party? Why doesn't the burrito shop just set up it's own ordering bot?
Am I missing something?
The edge cases seem so broad that to sufficiently fulfill them would require something like AGI and the more approachable tasks of ordering pizza or burritos seem unnecessary of a third party.
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).
But one would have to say that the relatively sparse training data consisting mostly of takeout orders, and the sweatshop like environment would be a strange way to go about attempting such a thing.
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?
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).
In the future, will "I thought it was a computer program behind the interface" be something like "I was just following orders"?
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.
You mean like the current functionality of WeChat, Telegram, Kik and FacebookM?
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.
> But she and another former employee, Alex Gioiella, said the only automated part of the service they saw was the occasional marketing text message.
You'd think that the human workers would at least get served up suggestions by the system if it were actually learning, to make sure the algorithm got "gold-standard" feedback on its dataset.
Especially requests like those for delivery food could be standardized pretty quickly, so that workers would only be handed situations where the "AI" (if there even was any machine learning involved) was uncertain as to what needed to be done.
> But usually, the Hero said, the requests were for pizza or Chipotle delivery.
Recommended viewing: "The Devil wears Prada", Andy's first day at Runway.
Companies describe the AI as two-fold: 1) actual AI responding to your requests and 2) Automation making human workers' jobs much easier, ie. a really good CRM or scheduling algo.
The reality is that high growth almost always means throwing more people at the problem under the guise of being "trainers" when in reality the technology only really caters to #2 (better automation) and the company is forced to pivot before ever really getting to #1 (AI handling the requests) either due to distractions or inability to actual deliver on the promise.
Does this remind anyone else of the anonymous voice actors behind the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer?
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.