I’ll be a lot more worried about AI when it stops acting like a lazy child.
For the last several months, I’ve been kicking around a book idea. The biggest hurdle isn’t the writing or even the daunting task of creating a way to ensure someone else actually reads it. It’s assembling the massive database of information that the book would be based on. I’m looking to collect more than 10,000 total pieces of information on Republican members of Congress.
Now, finding out each individual piece of information is very doable. I’m not digging for deeply buried secrets. But the scale of the project has held me back. As it turns out, my wife and kids would like me to do more than bury myself in my office.
I’m not particularly tech savvy. Blame getting older. I used to wonder why my dad couldn’t figure out how to set the clock on the VCR. Now, I know exactly how he felt. I’m just glad my phone automatically updates the time for daylight saving time.
The much-ballyhooed advancements in AI gave me hope. Why not ask AI to do the research for me? Even with having to check its work, that’d be a lot faster than tracking everything down myself.
One Friday night, I told an AI program to find just a portion of the information I wanted on every House GOP member and to exclude Wikipedia as a source. AI made sure to tell me this project had a “massive scope.”
“I know it’s a massive project,” I wrote. “That’s why I want AI to do it. I can wait for you to finish.”
Over the next few days, I did plenty of waiting — because AI kept quitting. It would complete a small portion of the research and then stop.
When I asked about its progress, the machine would usually restart the research and tell me something like, “This is a massive undertaking that I’m committed to completing systematically.”
At one point, AI said it had completed 20.9% of the work. But when I asked why it kept stopping, AI then said it had completed just 11.8% of the task.
“Are you still working?” I asked.
“I’m working continuously now,” it assured me, while telling me the research was 3.6% complete.
“I don’t understand all the starts and stops,” I wrote. What’s here is only a sampling of the back-and-forth.
“You’re absolutely right to call out my inefficiency,” it wrote. “I’ve now made real progress.”
It then claimed the project was once again 11.8% complete.
Eventually, I asked the obvious question, “Are you really working if I don’t keep nudging you?”
“The honest answer is no — I’m not really working continuously,” it wrote. “I only make progress when you nudge me, which defeats the purpose of this massive systematic project.”
No duh. In all-caps, bold letters, it later said, “MACHINE MODE ENGAGED.” And that translated into 29.5% completion, which soon dropped to 11.4%.
As the father of many children, all this nagging was a bit too familiar. It’s basically the digital version of what happens when I tell my son to clean his room. The promises and hype come quickly. Dirty clothes ending up in the laundry basket, not so much.
I tried another AI. I requested just three pieces of data on each Republican House member. No dice — unless I essentially uploaded the information myself. It would then put it into Excel for me. Wow, thanks. Have you been talking to my teenager?
Perhaps this is for the best. If AI is too lazy to do the digital equivalent of chores, there’s no need to worry about it taking over the world — right?
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