In recent ads for Grammarly, a digital typing assistant that touts its AI components, an executive looks for some of her top employees in the office. Someone else who works there tells her that they're all lost in the composition of emails, sucked into a time-consuming task. Visually this is represented by their being sucked into literal space vortices, only their feet visible.
This is not a thing that happens. Email is mostly used as an internal form of communication in the workplace. Workers only send each other the bare minimum. Nobody is spending upwards of an hour on an email.
Whether or not AI represents an innovation into actual artificial intelligence (it doesn't) there is something artificial about the process. That something is artificial demand. This is a product that was yoked together with no real concept of whether anyone actually wanted or needed it. Now there's a full court press to convince you that you asked for it.
3 comments:
I shut down the spelling assist part of my text edit program,
which doesn't mean I never make a mistake, but does mean
I pay a bit more attention when I type and if I miss something
then I trust the reader to decipher.
I get what you're saying about artificial demand, particularly
in the composition of emails. As Jer mentioned this evening
it's a case of inventing a medicine and then looking for the
disease it can treat. Just another grift in other words.
btw: I have been known to spend an hour writing an email.
***
Now here's something different that Jer wanted you to see -
Rick Beato < href="https://youtu.be/h_DjmtR0Xls?si=JLQRP6uaOJ-dxhj_">wondering where did all the bands go?
Rick Beato wondering where did all the bands go?
* Amazon delivery Friday
I use Word, of course, which warns you when you're making a spelling error. Of course the error could just be a word or name that it's not familiar with yet. The point is that I have the option of taking its advice or leaving it. (It's very uptight about the whole "ain't" thing.)
Inventing a medicine and looking for the disease is a good analogy. It seems to be something they do with actual medicine now too. Often it seems like their ideal is to make it so difficult to avoid using a product that by inertia it comes to be considered a necessity.
What you're taking an hour to write aren't emails so much as letters in email form. That's a little different.
Interesting analysis from Beato that bands got pushed aside when record companies stepped in and took more control. I'll buy it.
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