> Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't.

A lot of companies are creating AI assistants which take otherwise deterministic processes and makes them nondeterministic.

For example, I work in financial services and deal with a lot of data vendors. One of the big ones very recently added a chatbot to their UI, which on the second question I asked, provided entirely incorrect numerical but with confidence and 3-decimal place precision.

So the chatbot makes it "easier" to ask things, because you don't need to know which tab in the UI to use / or code to write in their scripting interface / or function to call in their Excel interface / or parameters to pass to get the correct answer.

Unfortunately the chatbot also may completely mistranslate your question, call the wrong function/pass wrong parameters and feed you back nonsense confidently.

Who is this helping?

▲

pjc50 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, this is not a good use of AI and the customer service people are going to gradually work that out, especially once people start having the "you know this is a legally binding statement on behalf of your company, right" discussion.

You can't put an AI in a flow which requires reliable results. I don't think people who are used to determinism have coped with that.

▲

steveBK123 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> You can't put an AI in a flow which requires reliable results. I don't think people who are used to determinism have coped with that.

The problem is .. what flows don't need determinism? Search results / recommendation engine / ad targeting ?

Arguably the majority of companies & corporate users are using these tools in cases they expect determinism. Email inbox summaries. Search summaries. What is the value of x queries. You'd be shocked.

My favorite Google AI summary bug/quirk that seems to persist (I just tested it again) - "are Lillies OK for cats". The summary starts with "Yes, lilies are extremely toxic to cats. "

I first hit this with another plant (lavender) where the response was much longer and on an iPhone looked like this:

Yes, lavender (both the plant and its essential oils) [line break]

is considered toxic to cats.

	▲	ben_w 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> The problem is .. what flows don't need determinism? Search results / recommendation engine / ad targeting ? That's not the relevant question, because the actual answer to what you asked is "all flows where human judgement is used". The thing we need to not blindly use current generation AI for is "things where we accept the combination of an untrained (or barely trained) human with no QA".