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Schnitzel bob's avatar

I work in government policy, my department has a team devoted to tech and "transformation," and of course AI is the latest darling.

They did a demo recently to show what it can do. You can enter a prompt and it will write a policy!

But as I told my boss recently, do you know how hard it is to write the actual policy? I can fart one out in an hour. Writing the thing is not the hard part!

Most of policy analysis is figuring out why people aren't implementing policy that's already been written (does it not make sense, is it not possible with current caseloads, are people acting in bad faith, etc). AI won't help with any of that.

The problem is it will probably take ten years of trying to make it work and laying people off before the people who make these decisions give up. I'm sure some fucker in a state or municipal governement somewhere has already drafted plans for getting rid of the people who think about government problems for a living on the belief that AI can do this instead.

Is that belief sincere? I honestly don't know. I'm not sure it makes a difference, although I'm with you, Vince: the people that piss me off the most are the ones that cheerlead how we're all going to get robofucked. They want AI to be Data from Star Trek, instead it's a Sybian duct taped to a mannequin.

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Kuato's avatar

I write corporate communications for a living. I want to have an open mind. Therefore, on a few occasions, I have asked ChatGPT to provide me with research sources that support a certain claim. It generates a list but when I go to the direct source there's nothing there.

So I ask ChatGPT for the links to the source it provided. Every time I do this the links lead to nowhere. Not even a 404 error. Just a link that does nothing when you click it.

I think the most astute assessment some have made is that AI is "eager to please." Like a hopeful, idealistic, young intern, it doesn't dare tell you "I don't know." Rather, it makes up shit on the spot to save face.

Of course, AI evangelists have wasted no time responding to this legitimate criticism by reminding people that they "need to get better at writing their prompts." That's right, they think the problem is that we've asked the wrong question, not that the answers come up empty.

No matter how many times and ways I think about all of this I keep arriving at the same conclusion, we all just need to go outside more.

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