I’ve long been interested in the value of AI and where and when it is particularly useful or gimmicky. Given the impact of AI on the environment (and costs), I often reflect on whether the AI input is worth-the-impact.
I have been using ELM to help tidy up and reword documents, I typically heavily edit its outputs but find it helpful to throw notes into it and ask it to rewrite in sentences or bullet points and then review. We also have automated captions turned on in both of our Media Hopper Services (Replay/Create) and they use (nonGen) AI to caption and we’ve had a really interesting project looking at how GenAI could help make them more accurate.
However, sometimes I see uses for AI and I think ‘what is the point??’. They aren’t just not useful, they are in-fact quite annoying and distracting and add no value.
I eagerly awaited the release of Apple Intelligence towards the end of last year on my phone. I was pretty disappointed when it came. It would summarise notifications for me, often making them longer or more complex than the actual notification. Ie a ‘Yes please’ from Myles would become a ‘Myles says yes please’. I switched it off soon after.
The trigger for this blog post for me was something that came up in a meeting earlier in the week. Copilot has appeared as part of MS Forms and provides ‘recommendations’ when you have the form in edit mode. It looks like it’s part of the form interface so it’s really confusing, and has a whole load of random recommendations most of which are not relevant or even actually inappropriate. The whole meeting wondered if we could switch them off – we plan to share the form with others as a template and didn’t want them to think we were making these random suggestions. I did a bit of Googling and was amused to find that we aren’t the only one’s finding this really annoying, the internet is full of people who think the same but I particularly enjoyed ‘Please for the love of God disable those recommendations’. This page includes classic quotes like:
‘Stop trying to force garbage AI into everything.’ Yep. Totally agree. Preferably have it default off so we can turn it on if we need to but at the very least I should be able to say I don’t want to use it now or again.
‘I literally cannot concentrate on the form I am trying to build while flashing buttons keep appearing’. So, nice and accessible then?
Sigh ‘Worse than Clippy. ‘ Well. That’s saying something.
Please… if you are an AI provider… add it where it actually adds value. Don’t destroy the planet for pointless gimmicks.
