Barack Obama: “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine. Music like Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, that’s different”::Barack Obama has weighed in on AI’s impact on music creation in a new interview, saying, “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine”.
What?
At best you’re arguing that because it’s not conscious it’s not useful, which… No.
My car isn’t conscious and it’s perfectly useful.
A system that can analyze patterns and either identify instances of the pattern or extrapolate on the pattern is extremely useful. It’s the “hard but boring” part of a lot of human endeavors.
We’re gonna see it wane as a key marketing point at some point, but it’s been in use for years and it’s gonna keep being in use for a while.
I agree with most of what you’re saying here, but just wanted to add that another really hard part of a lot of human endeavors is actual prediction, which none of these things (despite their names) actually do.
These technologies are fine for figuring out that you often buy avocados when you buy tortillas, but they were utter shit at predicting anything about, for instance, pandemic supply chains…and I think that’s at least partially because they expect (given the input data and the techniques that drive them) the future to be very similar to the past. Which holds ok, until it very much doesn’t anymore.
Well, I would disagree that they don’t predict things. That’s entirely what LLMs and such are.
Making predictions about global supply chains isn’t the “hard but boring” type of problem I was talking about.
Circling a defect, putting log messages under the right label, or things like that is what it’s suited for.
Nothing is good at predicting global supply chain issues. It’s unreasonable to expect AI to be good at it when I is also shit at it.
They make probabilistic predictions. Which are ok if you’re doing simple forecasting or bucketing based upon historical data, and correlates and all of that.
What they are crappier about is things that are somewhat intuitively obvious but can’t be forecasted on the basis of historical trends. So, like new and emerging trends or things like panic buying behavior making it so the whole world is somehow out of TP for a time.
I’d argue that relying solely on “predictive analytics” and just in time supply chains aggravated a lot of issues during the big COVID crunches, and also makes your supply chain more brittle in general.
I’m sorry, they aren’t good at predicting?
My man, do you have any idea how modern meteorology works?
A ton of data gets dumped into a ton of different systems. That data gets analyzed against a bunch of different models to predict forecasts The median of al those models is essentially what makes it into the forecast on the news.