Machine Learning / AI / SkyNet / Fields of Skulls

The answer is, if you applying for a job write your own application.

To be honeat they were quite easy to spot just by reading them. I wrote an extensive job description and got it quoted back at ne!

Oh absolutely. The problem is that all these “Is this AI” tools falsely flag self-written prose as being AI generated a lot of the time. If you’re going to be using them for something like handling job applications, you cannot use a tool that does that. And if they cannot build such a tool to function reliably, they’ll just need reading manually.

When I worked in PR, one of the top agencies hand wrote and then ‘biked’ (yes, it was that long ago) press releases out to editors and opinion formers (they call them influencers now).

This may sound odd, but editors get absolutely bombarded. They have the sort of inbox that makes a man want to scream and run into underground car parks.

I asked about this approach and the answer was simple:

“When was the last time you received a handwritten letter?, Psychologically, I suspect you’d be far more inclined to read it.”

The kickback against AI seems to be everywhere. Handwritten menus, coffee boards, signs outside shops. Things made by people rather than machines.

Who really wants artificial anything?

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I prefer to be spear fished by a human than a bot

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Thanks. I didn’t know that there are em-dashes and en-dashes (well, I sort-of did, but I didn’t recognise the subtleties) and now I (sort-of) do.

Every day’s a school day.

The strapline for AI ?

This isn’t new in recruiting they’ve had apps that look for key words/terminology and sift out those missing them for donkeys years now.

Techy terms like SIP, VoiP, Cisco, multicast or phrases like TOGAF, secure by design, V-model etc.

I just had my first situation where an AI would seem to be perfect - converting photos to a 3d model, for a charity thing I’m involved in.

The whole process was intensely annoying. I just wanted to check whether the basic workflow can be made to work - what kind of model do I get, how easy is it to resize and then work with in Fusion, will it be able to do what I need.

Every single AI I tried basically teased something, and then said that I’d need to sign up. I don’t mind paying, but I do mind paying for something when I don’t know if it’s actually going to be suitable.

Most annoying of all was the heavily advertised Meshy, which gave what looked like a nicely rendered model, but I could only download one created by Meshy 5 rather than Meshy 6. There does not appear to be a way to access Meshy 5, though!

Only the most pedantic typesetters (ironically, usually academic journals) have bothered to use any of the various hyphens and dashes correctly pretty much since the advent of the typewriter, 'cos few of those had more than one choice. I doubt even academic journals bother much nowadays, because: Americans.

Used well a dash adds a lot to legibility, used creatively it can really improve content, but I don’t trouble over which particular one it is personally.

I only knew there were two sorts because MSWord seemed sometimes to decide arbitrarily which one to use. I’d hit the ‘dash’ or ‘hyphen’ key (that’s just one key on my keyboard) and mostly I’d get the default en-dash but sometimes I’d get the em-dash. ISTR I’ve enclosed a phrase between dashes and occasionally got one of one sort and one of the other !

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Yebbut the real challenge is a well placed semicolon or colon: not forgetting the ellipsis…

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Perhaps the perfect simile.

[Leon Berard]

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Thanks for posting that Paul :ok_hand:

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+1, thanks Paul

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:astonished_face:

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Horses/Barn-doors, &c.

Interesting to reflect on the sneering that raising concerns about this general topic used to elicit here and elsewhere just five years ago…

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AI use is being really well thought out.

I think back then I was mostly skeptical about AI actively (‘consciously’ ?) turning on humans, as in Terminator. The possibility of one bit of IT harming another bit has been an issue for a long time.

My biggest worry is still that we have become critically dependent on IT systems without, in some cases, even understanding properly how those systems behave when stressed and also without retaining adequate fallback alternatives for when the IT goes tits-up. Let’s face it, it doesn’t take out-of-control AI to cause IT failures. Simply ‘upgrading’ it can be enough to make it malfunction catastrophically.

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“The Robot Is Your Friend…”

Hyperbolic stuff, but yeah… All the wrong people - as usual - are belatedly waking-up to the potential problems.

And all the money-hoarders who own everything will be ignoring them. Hard.

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We have Claude at work now.

The Environmental impact is obviously a worry, but fixable.

What isn’t fixable is putting it back in the box. It’s out and it isn’t going away. Those of us that have been granted a licence by IT all admit that losing Claude would be terrible. We are already starting to rely on it.

Need to build a lookup and pivot table: Ask Claude. Need a deck to explain the sales figures: ask Claude. It does in minutes what used to take us hours. And to a much higher standard than we used to churn out ourselves. Just in the last update the difference in quality is profound.

The reality of course is that this won’t free up time for me to play golf. It will just increase the expectation from the board on my productivity.

We’re screwed.