does anyone else remember delia derbyshire's band, white noise?
'your hidden dreams' is an especially sublime slice of electronic cake with symphonic icing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cloaUc7Q9kM
#deliaDerbyshire #electronic #music #whiteNoise #doctorWho

“Self-checkout could have been better integrated into supermarkets in ways that augmented and better-facilitated interactions between frontline workers and shoppers, but that design goal goes against the very reason they were adopted by retailers in the first place—to cut labor costs,” Mateescu says. “So the tool has a self-defeating logic to it from the get-go.”

Generative AI could be an instance of what self-checkout or automated customer service phone trees are: what Brian Merchant ( @brianmerchant@mastodon.social ) dubs "shitty automation" in the first link, with a similar kind of self-defeating logic built into it from the start. If the only purpose of a technology is to cut labor costs for corporations, then there's a decent chance everyone, including the corporations deploying the technology, eventually suffers from it. One of the weirdest things to witness in this latest AI hype cycle is the enthusiastic deployment of a technology that may end up producing worse products and services at greater expense than the laid-off people who used to produce those products and services. It also threatens to leave behind a kind of technological detritus: even companies that recognize the cost and poor quality won't be able to remove it once it's entrenched. Why all the enthusiasm?

Obviously I have no way of knowing whether that's what comes to pass, but a lot of signs are pointing that way. I've already had a few conversations with people, including a CEO, who told me they felt like they had no choice but to deploy generative AI somehow, because all their customers were doing so. But like the most-photographed barn--which is the most-photographed barn because it's famous for being the most-photographed barn--this kind of justification is ephemeral white noise. You are putting yourself into a dangerous position by following it: this ouroboros will eat your business once it's done swallowing its own tail. Very strange to witness.

#AI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #GPT #Copilot #Midjourney #DALLE #WhiteNoise