It’s your data. Do you know what Big Tech is doing with it? Our tech columnist found Google, Meta and Microsoft are taking your conversations, photos or documents to teach their their AI.
I mean yes, but this has been true for nearly 20 years at this point. Some of this comes back as useful features for everyone. Spam filtering, grammar checking, predictive text, maps route planning, face detection for all sorts of things. The same is true for many modern cars too, security cameras, etc. It all has to be trained on something and to collect more edge cases to improve.
I feel like the things you list had more human input, as built, and more scope to take human feedback into account to amend any issues.
The latter could of course be similarly used to refine AI versions, but as cost-cutting is a major attraction, this seems unlikely to happen unless the AI is do poor that the errors cost too much otherwise.
As things stand, we now must guess what a customer service bot or search engine might understand, framing our terms to fit our beliefs about how massed groups might make the same enquiry. Relatively simple tech questions are met, not with the conversations initiated by people with similar queries, but with reams of links to material offering solutions to almost the opposite problem. I.e.: “how do I disable x on y?” must be asked “disable x y?”, but you’ll struggle to find any link which isn’t “y is great, learn about the cool new x feature on y”, x is great, enable x", “what to do if you cannot enable x”. Maybe some bots telling you why wanting to disabling x is futile & wouldn’t you like to learn how great x is? “Your life will suffer if you disable x. You won’t be able to do things you never ever & would never want to do if you disable x” Which, for some things, there’s some validity to some parts of that, but for disabling a bloatware messaging app? Not so much, and potentially just indicative of terrible architecture.
Perhaps I should be optimistic that AI will rapidly patch this type of issue, being able to return responses that have a good analysis of the query, but feel it is more likely that flawed AI will hijack the whole.
It has been a good run, but swathes of us have lost what were standard means of seeking information.
Oh I don’t feel I’ve lost those means, and often prefer them still, but find even people of my generation who grew up without constant access to the internet fall to pieces at the prospect of looking in a book, a paper map or writing a letter, etc.
It is as if they forget the information persists without connectivity.
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I mean yes, but this has been true for nearly 20 years at this point. Some of this comes back as useful features for everyone. Spam filtering, grammar checking, predictive text, maps route planning, face detection for all sorts of things. The same is true for many modern cars too, security cameras, etc. It all has to be trained on something and to collect more edge cases to improve.
If you care, you avoid their services.
I feel like the things you list had more human input, as built, and more scope to take human feedback into account to amend any issues.
The latter could of course be similarly used to refine AI versions, but as cost-cutting is a major attraction, this seems unlikely to happen unless the AI is do poor that the errors cost too much otherwise.
As things stand, we now must guess what a customer service bot or search engine might understand, framing our terms to fit our beliefs about how massed groups might make the same enquiry. Relatively simple tech questions are met, not with the conversations initiated by people with similar queries, but with reams of links to material offering solutions to almost the opposite problem. I.e.: “how do I disable x on y?” must be asked “disable x y?”, but you’ll struggle to find any link which isn’t “y is great, learn about the cool new x feature on y”, x is great, enable x", “what to do if you cannot enable x”. Maybe some bots telling you why wanting to disabling x is futile & wouldn’t you like to learn how great x is? “Your life will suffer if you disable x. You won’t be able to do things you never ever & would never want to do if you disable x” Which, for some things, there’s some validity to some parts of that, but for disabling a bloatware messaging app? Not so much, and potentially just indicative of terrible architecture.
Perhaps I should be optimistic that AI will rapidly patch this type of issue, being able to return responses that have a good analysis of the query, but feel it is more likely that flawed AI will hijack the whole.
It has been a good run, but swathes of us have lost what were standard means of seeking information.
What standard means of seeking information did you lose? You can still visit a library or ask a friend?
I don’t think people remember what using search was like before google. All of the problems you mentioned weren’t even possible 25 years ago.
On other search engines you had to know specialized query languages.
This is all possible because google collects this data from users. They’ve been doing it forever, and it does have some value.
Oh I don’t feel I’ve lost those means, and often prefer them still, but find even people of my generation who grew up without constant access to the internet fall to pieces at the prospect of looking in a book, a paper map or writing a letter, etc.
It is as if they forget the information persists without connectivity.