Klarna claimed that AI chatbots were handling two-thirds of customer service conversations within their first month of deployment and went on to claim that AI was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. The problem is that it’s really doing the work of 700 really bad agents, and that quality took a toll. “As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” Siemiatkowski said. “Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us.”
— Read on gizmodo.com/klarna-hiring-back-human-help-after-going-all-in-on-ai-2000600767
Author: Jason
Three Reasons to Write More in an Age When Writing Means Less.
Slop world is here already, you just haven’t noticed yet.
In the face of this, I am going to try to write more. A lot more. I think you should too.
— Read on miloandthecalf.substack.com/p/three-reasons-to-write-more-in-an
Web archivists scrambling to save US public data from deletion
“Data is the modern lighthouse, helping us plan our lives: it shows where we are so we can plan where we’re going,” Cushman said.
— Read on www.yahoo.com/news/archivists-scrambling-save-us-public-191322244.html
A judge just blew up Apple’s control of the App Store | The Verge
Epic Games v. Apple judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just ruled that, effective immediately, Apple is no longer allowed to collect fees on purchases made outside apps and blocks the company from restricting how developers can point users to where they can make purchases outside of apps. Apple says it will appeal the order.
— Read on www.theverge.com/news/659246/apple-epic-app-store-judge-ruling-control
The Technium: The Unpredicted
It is odd that science fiction did not predict the internet. There are no vintage science fiction movies about the world wide web, nor movies that showed the online web as part of the future. We expected picture phones, and online encyclopedias, but not the internet. As a society we missed it. Given how pervasive the internet later became this omission is odd.
— Read on kk.org/thetechnium/the-unpredicted/
Doc Searls Weblog – Just trying to make stuff happen
Overheard: “AI is bullshit’s superpower.”
— Read on doc.searls.com/
Jackpot
The phrase has roots in Saugerties, N.Y., where Hallion grew up. He would go after school to play baseball at a local field from 4 p.m. until it got dark. The only problem was that his mom would start making dinner around 5 p.m. As a result, his siblings would often ride their bikes to the field and yell to him that his “ass was in the jackpot” because their mom was angry that he wasn’t home.
– The inside story of ‘ass in the jackpot’ and its insights on umps and managers
Dario Amodei — The Urgency of Interpretability
Modern generative AI systems are opaque in a way that fundamentally differs from traditional software. If an ordinary software program does something—for example, a character in a video game says a line of dialogue, or my food delivery app allows me to tip my driver—it does those things because a human specifically programmed them in. Generative AI is not like that at all. When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does—why it chooses certain words over others, or why it occasionally makes a mistake despite usually being accurate.
— Read on www.darioamodei.com/post/the-urgency-of-interpretability
Financial aid fraud persists at California’s community colleges – CalMatters
California’s community colleges are reporting a rise in financial aid fraud. In January, suspected bots represented 1 in 4 college applicants. Schools have given away millions to these scams, and college officials say fraudsters are getting smarter with the help of AI.
— Read on calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2024/04/financial-aid-fraud/