[steveBK123]

> Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't.

A lot of companies are creating AI assistants which take otherwise deterministic processes and makes them nondeterministic.

For example, I work in financial services and deal with a lot of data vendors. One of the big ones very recently added a chatbot to their UI, which on the second question I asked, provided entirely incorrect numerical but with confidence and 3-decimal place precision.

So the chatbot makes it "easier" to ask things, because you don't need to know which tab in the UI to use / or code to write in their scripting interface / or function to call in their Excel interface / or parameters to pass to get the correct answer.

Unfortunately the chatbot also may completely mistranslate your question, call the wrong function/pass wrong parameters and feed you back nonsense confidently.

Who is this helping?

[pjc50]

Yeah, this is not a good use of AI and the customer service people are going to gradually work that out, especially once people start having the "you know this is a legally binding statement on behalf of your company, right" discussion.

You can't put an AI in a flow which requires reliable results. I don't think people who are used to determinism have coped with that.

[steveBK123]

> You can't put an AI in a flow which requires reliable results. I don't think people who are used to determinism have coped with that.

The problem is .. what flows don't need determinism? Search results / recommendation engine / ad targeting ?

Arguably the majority of companies & corporate users are using these tools in cases they expect determinism. Email inbox summaries. Search summaries. What is the value of x queries. You'd be shocked.

My favorite Google AI summary bug/quirk that seems to persist (I just tested it again) - "are Lillies OK for cats". The summary starts with "Yes, lilies are extremely toxic to cats. "

I first hit this with another plant (lavender) where the response was much longer and on an iPhone looked like this:

Yes, lavender (both the plant and its essential oils) [line break]

is considered toxic to cats.