Tag: AI

  • Em Dash Is Fine – It Is AI That Sucks

    Here is a dialog from the movie Office Space — and just to be clear; Michael Bolton in the movie are talking about Michael Bolton the singer.

    • Michael Bolton: Yeah, well, at least your name isn’t Michael Bolton.
    • Samir: You know, there’s nothing wrong with that name.
    • Michael Bolton: There *was* nothing wrong with it… until I was about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.
    • Samir: Hmm… well, why don’t you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
    • Michael Bolton: No way! Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.

    And this made me think about AI — and em dashes.

    I have been told that em dash is the hallmark of AI writing, and that seeing em dashes in a text is a sure sign that an AI was involved. But this is simply not true.

    Granted; AI do tend to use em dash and bullet points a lot, but that in itself proves nothing, although it can be an indication of AI writing.

    The interesting thing is that the people who look at em dash and think “this must be AI”, are people that do not read much. And I could say that this is the hallmark of people using generative AI — they do not read. They do not know what good texts looks like.

    (And based on my writing you may say that neither do I)

    AI written text might look better than what most people write, but as John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes; most people are terrible writers, so the bar is low.

    I would rather see your words, and more importantly, your thinking on a subject than a grammatically correct text with a lot of unnecessary fluff.

    Writing is thinking after all, so why would you deprive yourself of this invaluable tool? And if you do not care to write it, why should I care to read it?

    I am not against AI on everything. I use it for research (the glorified search engine), but I always check multiple sources if it is important. But for generative text and images? Please, spare me.

    I like to use em dashes. Why should I change? It is AI that sucks.

    There, I am done. Now go watch Office Space.

  • The Glorified Search Engine Kills Again

    I’ve heard people say, “I don’t use search engines, I just ask AI”. And I get it. It’s easy. If you use Google, the first result is always Googles AI, Gemini, replying.

    Earlier this week, Apple announced that it would remove support for CoreStorage. So I Googled — in other word asked Gemini — to refresh my memory. Ah, yes, it’s the container Apple used to introduce, among other things, encryption to its old HFS+ file system.

    After going down that rabbit hole, asking more and more questions about HFS, HFS+ and the current APFS, I pivoted and asked a new question.

    In a new session, I asked about freelance photographer Chris Weeks, which I used to follow on DeviantArt1.

    At that time — around 2005–2010 — I was fascinated by Leica cameras, but also Chris’ ability to capture photographs of people like Jack Nicholson, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Natalie Portman, a homeless dog, and many, many more.

    He also had a distinct writing style which told the stories behind the photos.

    So I asked Google Gemini what Chris Weeks, the street photographer, is doing now. I can’t remember the exact question, but I do have the exact answer I got back.

    Chris Weeks, the renowned freelance editorial and street photographer, passed away at the age of 44 from colon cancer. In June 2017, shortly before his death, his wife and community organized a touching event where he was able to share a “wedding” dance with each of his three daughters

    Oh no! But it does explain why his Deviant account has been inactive since 2012.

    Only, I knew he had one daughter, not three. So I asked about the source, then wrote back that the image of this Chris Weeks did not look like the image of the other Chris Weeks. Also there where no mention about his photography at all.

    You are completely correct to point that out, and thank you for catching that error.

    The MPR News article is about a different man named Chris Weeks—a 12-year U.S. Army veteran from Wylie, Texas, who tragically passed away from colon cancer in 2017. He was not the street photographer.

    And

    I apologize for the confusion caused by combining their identities. Thank you again for flagging the discrepancy in the link!

    The things is; when using a search engine, you can pretty much understand that these are two different people based on the context, while the AI will happily mush two or more sources together and announce it as fact.

    In the end, I found the Chris Weeks I was looking for. But with no help from Gemini.

    So once again; be careful of using AI as a search tool. Especially when it comes to names and people. It might kill2 someone in the process.

    1. I logged into my DeviantArt account, and it has turned into an AI generated slop fest. There is a section called “today’s challenge” (#icecream), and I could not find one authentic image. Lots of AI nudes eating ice cream though. ↩︎
    2. When Snapchat introduced its AI a few years back, it managed to kill a Norwegian princess. “It was very tragic”, it said. Tragic indeed. ↩︎

  • What are the use cases for AI?

    This might read a bit negative, but I am genuinely curious. What is the use case for AI for ordinary people?

    With big tech building AI data centers like there is no tomorrow — which might be true for some of them (fingers crossed) — I’m left wondering; for what?

    In which scenario will we need so much AI compute?

    I get it for developers, which is what Microsoft and Anthropic is targeting. These are the users that are easiest to reach, due to their already established relationship with the tech companies.

    Microsoft has their own annual conference, Microsoft Build, which was mostly about AI this year. “Build the thing that builds the thing“. No surprise there.

    One thing that is surprising is that Atrophic, the company behind Claud, the number one programming AI, won’t even build a Mac app themselves. They have, just as everybody else, made an Electron app. If I were selling finance software, I probably would not use Excel for my own finances.

    So, developers use AI. But they are already onboard the AI train and doing just fine. How much more compute do they need?

    Then we have what used to be search. “I never search anymore, I just ask AI” is something I’ve heard more than once. And to be fair, it is hard to avoid it these days. The top result on Google is an answer from Gemini, their AI model.

    So, some people, use ChatGPT or Gemini or CoPilot as a search engine. We ask questions; to find recipes, how to fix things around the house or do some risky changes on a production server. But even then you should check the sources. At least I do, because that’s what I learned at school1.

    Not just because the sources might be wrong, but it might also be the case that the AI summarized it just a tad too much. Leaving out some important nuances, or making some assumptions it shouldn’t.

    I also heard people talk to ChatGPT as if it were a good friend or confidant2.

    Is this the use case that will generate growth? If so, who will pay for it? Because I’m sure that if you suddenly had to pay to talk to ChatGPT about how you should feel about something, that conversation would stop once the first bill arrives.

    Then we have people that use AI to write for them. The text doesn’t always make sense, but that’s ok. People who don’t like to write usually don’t like to read either, so for them it makes no difference. But again, how much would you be willing to pay to let an AI write an email for you?

    But wait. What about video and audio production? Sure, that might be a market. But I bet there is not a market to consume all this AI generated video, audio and images. If I see an article online with an AI generated image, I’m out of there before the dickover shows up. It just isn’t worth the time.

    Or maybe I’m wrong, and that the zombie kids of tomorrow happily will watch 16 hours of AI generated crap filled with ads each day.

    One way for these companies to make money is of course by force. Microsoft can say: “you need a subscription that includes CoPilot if you want to continue to use Windows”. Because they have already built CoPilot into everything from Excel to Notepad.

    But even then it is just force to pay. Not force to use. Because, again, what shall people use CoPilot for? Realisticly?

    I recently opened Outlook on my phone — because work — and I was confused for a few seconds. Instead of just one icon to add a new event, as there has always been, there was now two. And the second one was CoPilot.

    I fail to see the point though. If you click on it, it will just open a prompt asking you for questions. It takes more time to prompt it to add an event than it takes clicking on an empty slot in the calendar, set the time, subject, and click “save”.

    After creating said event, I would still need to check it afterwards, opening up the same interface that I would use to manually fill in the information in the first place.

    And while I do believe in using AI as a tool, I don’t see a use case that will justify the billions that have been, and continue to be, funneled into it.

    So once Oracle and Microsoft has burned through their cash building data centers. And OpenAI and Anthropic has burned through their cash (and others) and find themselves unable to pay for the use of these data centers. Who will use them?

    What is the use case for AI?

    1. I learned not to trust anything found on the internet, once the internet made its appearance that is. ↩︎
    2. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes: There’s something wrong with people who consider today’s chatbots to be their friends or companions.
      ↩︎

  • M-series Macs are Amazing

    I am blown away by this Apple M-series. And by blown away, I mean the complete opposite, because there are no fans. Nothing blows!

    And it seems like I bought it just at the right time. The new prices Apple announced today has made my MacBook Air 3000 NOK (around $300) more expensive in Norway.

    The price change did not come as a surprise. Tim Cook did give a warning last week that prices would have to increase due to high cost on memory and storage chips. The same chips AI eats for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

    I have not yet put the Mac through its paces. But in my experience, most laptops get a heatstroke just by playing a YouTube video these days.

  • (A)I made a WordPress Widget

    What I made is not important — it’s a list of kayak courses and available spots.

    I already had created the logic — no AI needed for logical thinking1. So I already had the authentication, the API calls, the custom filtering and the presentation layer.

    But since I didn’t have any experience with WordPress plugins/widgets, I hosted it on a separate domain and embedded it onto the web site. This has worked for years.

    However, there were a few drawbacks. Mainly that it was dependent on my private website to be up in order to work. On the positive side; when things broke, I could easily debug it on my own server. Like the time the API stopped working, and it turned out I had been using an internal API endpoint, and not the one in the documentation. Whoops.

    So, with AI being all over the place, and Microsoft pushing CoPilot on everything that can be displayed on a screen, I decided it could not hurt to ask it to make a simple Widget that I could plug my logic into.

    I asked CoPilot to create a basic Widget. I asked it to display a placeholder text for now, but that I needed a settings interface to enter username and password for the API authentication.

    When I tried this crude plugin, nothing worked. I wrote to CoPilot: “it doesn’t work”, to which it basically replied “Your code is wrong”, and then continued to present the right way to do it.

    And this is what surprised me the most. Several times, CoPilot presented some code, just to lament me about it later.

    Yes, I know there are other models2 out there that are a lot better for programming. But I only needed to make a simple template for a WordPress widget, not make an E-commerce system from scratch.

    But part of me wonder; do these models behave this way just to make people spend as many tokens as possible?

    Credit where credit is due

    But I have to give CoPilot some credit as well. First, it did eventually present a workable Widget that I could put my logic into. Secondly, it created new token manager for me. My previous solution was to use Curl to get the API token bearer and store in a file. Hardly best practice.

    I also learned a little bit more about WordPress.

    1. I know some people automatically thinks text with em dash is written by an AI, but everything I publish I write myself. ↩︎
    2. I am not a programmer. I do this for fun. If I have used the wrong tool for the job, so be it. ↩︎