Loading…
13
My uncle who retired from IBM in 1998 asked me if AI still just autocorrects emails
I was at my uncle's place in Rochester over the weekend and he asked me, dead serious, if AI has gotten any better at fixing his typos since Clippy. I tried to explain large language models to him using his own stamp collection as an example, and he just said "so it's a parrot that read the whole library." Now I can't stop thinking about that, so for the folks who work with this stuff daily, how do you explain what's actually new here to someone whose last tech reference point is a flip phone?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
mary_martin224d ago
Ha, the parrot line is honestly better than most explanations I've heard from actual tech people. Reminds me of when my dad asked if the internet was "just a bunch of fax machines talking to each other" and I couldn't really argue with the logic. Sometimes the weird version your family comes up with sticks better than the real one, so your uncle might be onto something.
2
the_anthony4d ago
The fax machine thing is funny because it's not even that far off when you think about how data actually moves. Here's the angle I keep coming back to though: nobody really understands the whole internet. Not even the people who build it. Each person knows their little piece and the rest is trust. So your uncle's parrot line and your dad's fax machine line might be just as honest as any expert's answer, because the expert is mostly guessing about the parts they don't touch too.
1