AI: Considerations for people who make decisions - Bert Hubert's writings
berthub.eu
Recently I gave two presentations in quick succession to the Dutch Network of Government Service Providers and the Dutch Advisory Council for Science, Technology and Innovation about AI. In these two different and brief presentations, I hoped to share some insights that would be useful to the people currently at the helm, the people who can or must make decisions about AI policy. Many thanks to the NPD and AWTI for the invitations and the stimulating discussions!
  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
    101·
    14 days ago

    The takeaway is that people, and especially executives, with personal positive AI experiences are not necessarily well positioned to decide on behalf of their organization whether AI has been a success. No matter how good it feels on a personal level. The same applies to people who use ChatGPT individually for work: it may feel great to have AI write and summarize reports for you, but is the organization actually becoming better as a result? That may not be your concern personally, but it certainly is the concern of management. I’ll return to that later.

    An enormous problem is that in most organizations, people no longer evaluate whether AI is actually successful, or even can be. After all, it’s “the future.” AI is indeed here to stay, but it would still be nice to think carefully about what we should actually do with it. Or at the very least, define beforehand what you expect it to achieve and measure whether it actually does. Because “it felt good” simply isn’t enough. More on that later.

  • Pomal@sh.itjust.works
    64·
    14 days ago

    This article conflates the disdain for corporate entities shoving LLMs everywhere with the underlying mathematics that drives their machine learning algorithms, and labels everything as AI without a lens of criticality.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      21·
      14 days ago

      Does it really? He does not omit to mention that generative AI might be more useful in the future, and AI algorithms have been used successfully.

      • [deleted]@piefed.worldEnglish
        6·
        14 days ago

        Yes.

        Some people like to dismiss AI as nonsense. “Fancy autocomplete.” “A stochastic parrot.” Here’s a counterexample from biology, a field I happen to know quite well:

        LLMs are fancy autocomplete. He then has a counter example of actually useful AI that has beeen around for decades and isn’t what people who criticize AI are talking about because corporate LLMs have coopted ‘AI’ in their branding.