One of those webinars

Don’t worry, it was fully optional.

I assisted to a webinar about “the potential of AI” in the workplace, and you can already guess what sort of conference I had to go through yesterday. I shared a livestream of my thoughts on my Polymaths’ profile in case you want to see my reactons to what was said there, it’s hilarious stuff.

Something I didn’t mention on that thread was a little quizz at the start, where people filled out polls and the like, and one of the pages was actually a word cloud, they asked “what words come to mind when you think about AI?”.

Of course, I typed a few: “Wasteful”, “lazy”, “slop”, “unethical”… there was no limit I found to how many I could add, but I stopped with those. They didn’t even show up in the word cloud.

“Useful”, “automation”, “future”, “tool”, “assistant”.

Each word got bigger as more and more people typed them in real time.

This wasn’t a multiple choice question, they were chosen and submitted by many.

It is unfortunate, and undeniable, how many people today are perfectly okay with all this, even when they are aware of the bad they caused and continue to cause—they simply look the other way.

“It’s a necessary evil now, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“We need to catch up with the times, it’s the same as the calculator or the personal computer”

One of the common themes during the presentation was how “you should learn how to use it, don’t stay behind”, because “you will not be replaced by it, but by those who know how to use it”.

Honestly though, as grim as it sounds, I couldn’t help but cringe at every example and slide showed through the whole thing. The generated graphics, the generated prompts, pretty much all the information there was not made by the presentator, none of the examples or problems solved were real.

It’s such a big charade, and the fact everything started with how much running these things can cost and how “it’s not that the AI is inneficient, it’s just that you don’t prompt it properly” let me know it’s all just a joke.

At some point the host shared their screen and started to copy-paste example prompts, while the sidebar featuring a chat history was in full display. “Answer this email”, “summarise this email”, and almost out of frame… “I’m doing a webinar about[…]”.

Check the thread if you want, it’s a good laugh. Watching the bubble pop will be fun.

This is day 98 of #100DaysToOffload.