this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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But having an AI do it is cheaper so that's where we're going.
Cheaper for now, since venture capitalist cash is paying to keep those extremely expensive servers running. The AI experiments at my work (automatically generating documentation) have got about an 80% reject rate - sometimes they're not right, sometimes they're not even wrong - and it's not really an improvement on time having to review it all versus just doing the work.
No doubt there are places where AI makes sense; a lot of those places seem to be in enhancing the output of someone who is already very skilled. So let's see how "cheaper" works out.
At a consulting job I did recently they got an AI for a specific task to have an 25% rejection rate. Which I thought was pretty good and the team working on it said there was no way they could do better, this is the absolute best.
So they went and asked the customers if they would be interested in this feature and how much they would be willing to pay. The response was nobody was willing to pay at all for the feature and a 25% rejection rate was too high.
The reason customers gave was this meant they still need a human to check the results, so the human is still in the loop. And because the human basically has to do most of if not all of the work to check the result, it didn't really save that much time. And knowing their people, they will probably slack on the checks, since most are correct. Which then leads to incorrect data going forward. This was simply not something customers wanted, they want to replace the humans and have it do better, not worse.
And paying for it is out of the question, because so many companies are offering AI for free or close to free. Plus they see it as a cost saving measure and paying for it means it has to save even more time for it to be worth.
So they put the project on ice for now, hoping the technology improves. The next customer poll they did, AI was the most requested feature. This caused some grumbles.
Saving this comment for posterior
Posterity?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/posterity
Why would I save something for posterity when I could save it for posterior?
Butt