Dammit Janet, but this AI thing isn’t working out! There must be a reason for this! It’s so amazing, and yet, all the things we’ve been promised, like a lower wages bill and massive productivity gains from the skeleton staff we deign to employ simply aren’t happening.
Nigel from marketing has a great idea. He suggests giving a ‘research company’ a six figure sum to produce some ‘research’ that will explain why that’s the case to an audience of bizness leeders and at the same time (and this is the really clever part), encourage them to do a couple of things that will shift some product that we happen to sell. Genius!
Here are reasons 24 and 25 (1 to 18 are here, 19 to 23 here) that sticking a large language model into your workplace falls on its arse. Enjoy, and remember, shiny thing make it better. (We Sell Shiny Thing™)
- “Most organisations fail to train their staff to use AI properly.” Your employees can’t seem communicate with AI using the method by which AI communicates. That’s right – using ‘natural language’ doesn’t work, despite the fact that AI’s big selling point is that ‘natural language’ can be used to communicate with it. Staff have to relearn to use the language they speak so they can adopt the manner of a God Of Pedantry teaching a moronic three-year-old. Step by step, patiently correcting, repeating, trying again, re-correcting, offering sweets and bribes, trying for a third time, quietly going mad and retiring to the staff room for a sneaky ciggie while their charge is thinking things over, and so on. Train your people how to do this! It’s more time-consuming than getting them up to speed on Excel macros and pivot tables, but it’s so much more worthwhile. Once they’ve melted an icecap of their own, they can have software make occasionally-catastrophic mistakes on their behalf. Problem solved.
- “Staff are scared of losing their jobs to AI, so won’t use it.” Your honour, I respectfully submit to the court items #46 through #460,096 detailing articles from the interwebs and print media that state, “AI will cause people to use their jobs”. Yes, your honour, these articles were indeed written on the back of press releases from large AI companies to make their software really really attractive to bidnuss leedahs. Sadly, they seem to have backfired, your honour. Some of these Pullitzer-nominated works also mentioned the Terminator films, which in hindsight, may have been going too far. No one is going to lose their job, after all, because in real life, AI’s really terrible at doin… Dammit, did I just say that in open court? FFS.
Remember folks, “the organisations that treat AI literacy as a strategic priority, not a box-ticking exercise, will be the ones that unlock meaningful productivity gains and long-term competitive advantage.” (Forrester VP principal analyst JP Gownder.) I wonder if old JP would like to unlock deeznuts?