Musings on Generative AI
This is a sort-of transcript of a talk I gave a couple of times last year. If you’d prefer you can watch one of the recordings:
Alternatively you can read through the presentation with my notes here.
This blog post goes into more detail, as I don’t have to constrain myself to a twenty minute slot. However, I know lots of people prefer to have a video or audio transcript these days that they can watch at a higher speed, or even skip through, so the recordings/presentation are provided above.
Even though the talk could have been a short five minute “lightning talk” I intentionally made it longer to build up to the final point. And part of building up to that is to highlight some of the contradictions and complexities in this space. Also nuance. Nuance is difficult to get across in text, however, but I do think I’m improving at that. The recordings may be better in that aspect.
I do think that nuance is being lost in the race to automate, summarise, and shorten everything, which is a shame as nuance is part of what makes things interesting and more, well, relatable. Stripping that all out, removing the voice of the author and their idiom? It really shouldn’t be happening in many places. It reminds me of the opening of Bradbury’s novel:
“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”
That’s what I sometimes feel is happening at the moment.
Sometimes it’s not even nuance, it’s stuff missing the mark completely. Even this tiny little slice of the web isn’t immune from it. I posted a couple of things recently that got a bit of traction on Hacker News and inevitably they got reposted elsewhere.
In one particular case the repost is clearly some (fake?) person’s LinkedIn bot scraping the front page of Hacker News and summarising the links with AI very poorly, not understanding the content of the posts and seemingly just going by the titles, and then highlighting them as noise in their feed as if they had written it themselves:
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