Category: AI

LeadDev London 2024 Day 1

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

Some speakers are worried about AI (AI skills threat as defined by Cat Hicks) and shared how they deal with it. The quote of the day is this – “I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been” (Wayne Gretsky, shared by Lena Reinhard). However, given that all the tech visionaries and CEOs know this saying, we all move in packs towards that point with AI doing something. This reminds me of an old quote I shared in 2018 here:

By any normal measure, our growth was great, but it quickly became clear it could be a lot better if we operated less like a soccer team of seven-year-olds: all of us chasing the ball, none of us in position.

— Kim Scott. Radical Candor

According to Cat Hicks, science shows building a less-competitive company culture improves morale and people are less concerned if they’ll adapt to the change. The best response to the lurking AI in all the talks came later, and sorry I didn’t manage to take a photo of it to be more precise. Not a precise quote: “The best things in life come from uncomfortable, messy, and chaotic situations. We will live better if we embrace the mess and treat the situation as an opportunity. (It’s science).” I wrote down the source and it’s a book called Messy – The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tom Harford. I’ll add it to my list.

Apart from the AI-speak, I was impressed by a talk about Architecture, and another about dealing with Technical Debt. The one about technical debt is worthy of a separate post.

AI Translate

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

The advancement of AI in translation tools makes my blogging more difficult. I get strange results when trying to find a word and get a clear reminder that I should not overly rely on this tech.

The Bulgarian word for “Cleaver” is translated as “Satyr” because of the proximity in letters. The Bulgarian word for “Wild Plums” is translated as “Junkies”. The Lungwort plant is translated as lungs recurringly over a variety of tools.

I tried ChatGPT and it’s better but still fails, and you can’t really trust a tool that fails for unknown words without checking elsewhere.

Bing Translate can do formal or informal translations but both are questionable. The 3 words above produced 4 different mistakes and 0 correct hits.

I’m switching back to using a dictionary for now. The type of assistance I need is not served well by AI-based translation tools. Convenience-wise, they’re super quick and convenient but not accurate yet.

All Systems Red

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

A wonderful novella by Martha Wells, beautifully published by Artline Studios. The book is tiny and is a quick read. It’s about a very human murder bot whose job is to protect a group of planetary explorers. I’ll probably wait for the translations because the hardcover is so pretty.

The suggestion for this book came from a fellow blogger and friend @dni.

5/5, and the best book I read this month so far.

Cory Doctorow on AI

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

Spicy autocomplete absolutely can’t replace journalists.

— Cory Doctorow on AI

There’s something very deep in our response to righteous anger. Spicy autocomplete. Righteous anger, followed by italic uncertainty. Dehumanizing the AI so that we’re ready for eradication. At the same time, AI is already replacing human content creators – journalists, bloggers, illustrators, troll farms, SEO experts, photographers, data labelers, etc.

Generative AI is not necessarily terrible. ChatGPT can be forced to link to the source of each of its statements and will become like a search engine. Websites can flag human-created content with a badge of honor. The chatbots could be used where human support was previously impossible, increasing the need for more specialized human support and sales.

The society managed to navigate harmful technological advances in the past. Open Source happened. I don’t quite see how we’ll push back against some of the negative uses of AI like deepfakes but we’ll have to figure it out.

My post from 2023 on content aggregation is still relevant.

Bad Grammar Can Be a Feature

~ Veselin ~ 29 Comments

Engines love to consume lengthy content and rank it higher on search. ChatGPT can generate tons of additional meaningful text for the idea. However, as a reader, I prefer to read content written by humans and for humans. I’d rather read meaningful ideas in ugly sentences with simple words and poor grammar than AI-assisted beautiful novellas with a summary and headlines.

In that context, bad grammar, slang, lower-case text, and such can be a form of anti-language that identifies the post as human-written and non-AI-augmented. It can be a feature, not a bug (now I have an excuse to turn off Grammarly lol).