Engineering Technology and Chat AI
Let’s face it: Engineering technology is kind of boring. Boring to read about and boring to write about. Except for those of us who use it, and we find it fascinating. But have you noticed? There are a lot of articles out there that are written by people who obviously don’t have a passion for it. Or maybe they’re written by bots. The thing is, you can’t really tell the difference. Bland articles that don’t strike any interest, are stuffed with silly business jive and don’t really tell you anything that you didn’t already know – not even an opinion.
With all of this chat AI stuff in the news recently, I’m thinking if it isn’t time to shut down this site that’s been around for longer than I can remember. But if I did that, what would the AI learn from? It would be chat bots teaching chat bots in an ever blanding spiral to complete entropy, right? Just like a gene pool needs outside input, I’d bet that AI needs real human input from time to time. It can’t just feed on itself without devolving into self-absorbed computer blather, right? What would you do if you read articles with absolutely no misspellings? Or no there instead of they’re or their? What if all you got from this blog were just absolutely correct but completely uninteresting and uninformative? It would all eventually just grind to a halt in an endless feedback loop. Perpetual motion machines don’t work, and chat bots that only learn from themselves can’t generate anything new.
AI authorship might be a neat trick to grind out something you don’t have time to write and won’t be checked by a real human, but at scale, I don’t think we have anything to worry about. CAD writing couldn’t get much more bland than it already is, with people who don’t understand it repeating what marketing who also doesn’t understand it has told them to say, it’s not likely to improve. Many of the advances in the CAD industry in recent years are just recycled IT improvements focused at the “get-em-on-the-subscription-gravy-train” market, there are only a few things that are really important anyway, and I for one don’t expect any AI chat bot to understand which is which.
So for better or worse, I’m still here. Still banging the keys with bad spelling and grammar, affect instead of effect, and way too much passive voice, and incomplete sentences. Proving that to err is human, but it takes an AI chat bot to really get it wrong.
Never stop banging those keys, Matt. Your thought processes are too valuable.
Is it cynical or just realistic to expect trolls and Russians to keep flooding the web with subtle half-truths with the goal of sabotaging AI (in addition to everything else)? The internet is an unreliable source for information, and if that’s how AI learns, it’s doomed. It will never be a trustworthy source of any kind of information.
AI is interesting in that it could be used to truly enhance our abilities, but in many examples, it is used to simply game the system. The same Chat AI could be used to take original content from a technically astute author, but one who failed basic grammar, and it could create a truly great article.
Or you could use to write term papers that pull from other samples, but it makes it appear to be original… The choice in direction is still a human one.
Matt,
I couldn’t agree more… Today I got “another” newsletter I never signed up for announcing a NEW 3D Printer based on the one I already own. So for once I was impressed that it wasn’t just spam. So getting directed to the makers website, were I read all I could about the new features, but of course the few areas of interest I had weren’t covered. So I did a Web search and was able to find at least a dozen or more reviews of the new printer. But they were all the same Press Release from the maker, with nothing more. All of the articles wanted me to signup to keep up to date, but none of them even had a Printer in front of them. So after an hour or so I realized it’ll be months before anybody writes a serious review about the new printer, for me to maybe get my questions answered.
The point is that in today’s internet world there’s just too many websites parroting other peoples work and claiming it’s great content.
But here at DezignStuff we get you… a true content developer with real opinions and honest assessments of an Industry that needs it more than ever.
So don’t give up…. real people need real content and not some Chat AI rehashing what it’s read from a Google search. Think about how long before the marketplace will figure out how to flood the Web with similar opinions just to fool the AI algorithms. We already suffers from too much single-minded thinking.