There’s a truism that AI only seems smart as long as you don’t know too much about the subject it’s covering, and after like 20 years I’m approaching the level of search engine mind-meld you’d find in a character from a William Gibson novel. I’m fascinated by the conversational aspect, but for actually running down complicated queries to dig up information, it feels like amateur hour.

In terms of actually providing factual answers, chatbots will almost certainly get better! But their format hides a bunch of the metadata that helps me figure out how to weigh a given piece of information quickly or explore the source text to glean stuff the search results don’t pull out. Until they get good enough to compensate for that by synthesizing data better than my brain can, it’s in sort of a “one step forward, two steps back” situation.

@thedextriarchy my initial reaction was that it doesn't seem worth it to make a bunch of people stupider and potentially cause harm while AI developers figure it out, but we're doing a fine job of being wrong and getting stupider without AI, so maybe we should just leave them to it.

@nobert I deeply miss AI being a weird thing people tooled around with and tried to figure out rather than deploying it way too early for high-stress practical use.

@thedextriarchy Just wait until they start plugging it into more things than scrapable web data and text boxes on web sites! Can't wait for badly-tuned AI with access to realtime observations being able to, I dunno, charge people with crimes or deploy armed robots.