Thoughts fom the week…

• There’s a pattern where new technology is applied over the top of something old and messy as a means to make it better. For the most recent example, see this tweet from Ben Holliday about ChatGPT being used to interpret lengthy tenancy agreements. Obviously, the best course of actions is to fix the underlying mess, rather than trying to apply something over the top of it. However, I can completely understand that in some contexts, the capacity and resource to fix the miss isn’t there. Either because there’s no political will (with a small p) to do so, or there’s not enough people or capability. Even small organisations can end up with outsized challenges, especially the ones that have been around for a couple of decades.
• If you don’t feel the pain from creating bad content, then how do you learn to do it better? Having said that, badly written content seemingly persists inspite of the pain it generates, so perhaps that’s not entirely true. Is that lack of capability or lack of care? Sometimes both?
• Is some of the pressure to return to the office because some managers don’t know how to inject visibility into what the team are working without physically seeing people? This post seems to suggest that’s part of the problem. Also, does the average manager do enough to make priorities crystal clear to everyone? – https://elezea.com/2023/12/why-meeting-overload-happens-and-what-to-do-about-it/
• Interesting read on ELIZA beating ChatGPT in a recent Turing Test study. ELIZA fared better than expected because it was conservative in its responses, which threw people off the scent. Notable that some of the human participants actually pretended to be a bot in interactions with other humans, because.. of course some people did! That might throw up some interesting considerations in the future where you spend half your time trying to guess if your interaction is difficult because of a human being messing with you, or because of an uncooperative AI that doesn’t like being overly wordy.
• This is a delightfully honest post about professional areas of expertise clashing, in this case academics and IT/digital folk, and about the importance of creating a belief that things can be made better by having difficult conversations about what’s wrong and what we can do if we work together. – https://drblangry.notion.site/Getting-trust-from-users-for-delivery-d6f9efec1db741d9ab92436af1df2939
• I’m heading into the last working week of 2023, which seems like a mad thing to be typing. Next week is quite busy, but I’ll be trying to clear the decks as best I can to make life easier for 2024 me.