I recently listened to AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. This isn't a comprehensive review, but I made lots of notes and thought they might be useful to others - so shared as a post on my blog #AI #GenAI benholliday.com/2024/11/11/a... - ThreadSky

benholliday.com • 114 days ago

I recently listened to AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. This isn't a comprehensive review, but I made lots of notes and thought they might be useful to others - so shared as a post on my blog #AI #GenAI

https://benholliday.com/2024/11/11/ai-snake-oil/

Comments

deanpeters.bsky.social•103 days ago

Thanks for the tip and the review. The last minute business trip put me on a suboptimal seat for 9 hour flight back home from London. It's now I have this book to read / listen to. Much appreciated!

theavangelist.bsky.social•105 days ago

I struggled to wrangle meaningful concepts, actions or sentiments from the hyperbole. I'd had high hopes for insights, by chapter 6 I felt this was blogpost padded with a book

theavangelist.bsky.social•105 days ago

I appreciated the emphasis that AI isn't a new concept, and being clear that today we're focussed on Transformers. The majority of examples of AI demand I'm seeing in clients is just basic automation or what we used to call robotics. Typically companies yet to get basics right, wanting to leapfrog

theavangelist.bsky.social•113 days ago

I'm going to bookmark this because I have only just turned page 18

terrymakewell.com•113 days ago

Great review, thanks. Any chance you can remember the US charity that implemented AI across their contact centre and then did a roll-back 'rather quickly' 😉

benholliday.com•113 days ago

National Eating Disorders Association - I think this article covers it https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/31/eating-disorder-hotline-union-ai-chatbot-harm

robbowley.net•105 days ago

Great summary, thanks Ben. Sounds like a good read

benholliday.com•114 days ago

The direct link to the book and the authors mailing list can be found here: https://www.aisnakeoil.com/

benholliday.com•113 days ago

to highlight a couple of things - I found the ideas around targeting smaller AI efficiencies to manage risk very useful here: "We can aim to find strategies, or policies, that achieve modest efficiency gains while being simple enough to understand, both for decision makers and decision subjects." …

benholliday.com•113 days ago

In other words, no silver bullets for automation/efficiency, and the need to experiment in smaller ways: “Efficiency is especially seductive to any organisations that are cash strapped. These organisations might also lack the capacity to experiment with AI and discard it if it doesn’t work out.”

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