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by unfamiliar 975 days ago
“Siri, what’s 9am Pacific Time?”

> gives me the current date.

“Siri, what’s 9am Pacific Time in my local time zone?”

> gives me the current time.

I could go on…

2 comments

Someone else a while back commented he said he told Siri to “turn on the living room light” and it did so at his mom’s house instead.

Or the classic where you ask something simple and it looks the query up on the internet verbatim instead. Or completely bungles a clearly enunciated query.

“Hey Siri, what’s 3 * 9?” “Looking up ‘treehouse sign’ on the internet”

Try asking about cities rather than time zones.
I don't want to try to understand the AI, when the promise was that the AI will be able to understand me.
The Promise: "Cars will get you from point A to B at 100kmph"

"I got in a car and said go. It didn't go."

"Did you try putting it into gear?"

"That wasn't the promise! I already understand my horse and it goes fast enough when I say go. Why should I now have to understand a car?"

Tools are tools! AI is not different. Like any tool, it will have limits, it will get better, it will keep having other limits.

Learn the new tool if you want to, don't learn the new tool if you don't want to. But it feels disingenuous, and your valid criticisms get lost, when you claim "The tool doesn't do what I want! and stop trying to teach me how to use it!".

I'd agree with you if the whole purpose of AI wasn't that you don't need to learn anything new, instead you can talk to it like you talk to people.

If a person would understand what I mean but an AI doesn't, the AI is broken.

I’ll speak for myself, but I most certainly need to learn how to understand and be understood by other people. So that is what I expect from AI.
I'll make the point even clearer: The promise of AI assistants is that, given that you already know how to make yourself understood by people, a skill the vast majority of the population already possesses, the AI assistant does not require any additional learning.