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I say nothing interesting happens on LinkedIn, and in my experience, people are right.
However, the other day, a colleague showed me a post on the site of a man who said he had started attending online meetings 30 seconds earlier. He said it would be better to record the current use of AI Note Taking Assistant for virtual meeting transcriptions to be kept in moderation.
He then begins to scream that he is on the Titanic, who has just hit the iceberg, and needs help from Pronto before continuing the rest of the meeting as normal.
“When the meeting is over, everyone gets an email transcript with AI summary.
I’m enjoying this story and hopefully it will eventually travel around the property where someone may have discovered that they are making good use of AI in their offices.
Obviously, I’m constantly listening to the latest “use cases” of “AI Space.”
Also, Google Deepmind scientists were co-winners of last year’s Nobel Chemistry Prize, recognising that they’ve already helped speed up work on unwieldy issues like antibiotic resistance and plastic pollution.
On the right hand, artificial intelligence can clearly be a great power of good. I just keep coming across people like Sarah Harop.
Harrop is an employment partner at Addleshaw Goddard Law Firm in London. That is, it addresses unfair dismissal, discrimination and other abuse claims.
Since ChatGpt arrived, she says there has been a clear increase in the number of highly detailed, long, outwardly reliable communications to the HR department and the employment courts.
Documents often contain references to legal precedents and other references to the law.
“We’ve seen dozens of communications sent to employment courts,” she told me. The length of the documents and the speed at which they are generated suggests that they are almost certainly generated by robots rather than humans, she said, adding that this creates “huge pressure” for employers and the courts.
I can imagine this boring and expensive burden for employers, but I am sure they are not alone.
Last week, I mentioned several people in Harrop’s observations and quickly learned that employees are by no means the only employee using AI to use turbocharged complaints.
The longtime school governor said the amount and intensity of AI support complaints almost certainly spiked over the past 18 months.
Complaints were often well-made and included persuasive references to legal precedents that made them difficult to ignore, he said.
This situation has not been mitigated anytime soon. The Internet is currently flooded with sites that offer the power of AI to generate powerful, well-written complaints.
We tested something designed for our employees. In a large office that employees recently visited, they tested, saying they wanted a letter about the extent to which men’s bathrooms exceeded those of women.
Within seconds, it vents an active, grammatically correct, and anxiously persuasive accusation, despite what is called an unfair and discriminatory arrangement that “presents a negative and potentially unprofessional impression” to female guests.
I am not denying that this has caused a surge in gratitude and that it must have happened many times when complaints about AI appeals have been fully justified. Tinsel products, unfair parking tickets, and malicious employers are undoubtedly all grounds.
But a world where those charged with handling complaints are buried under an avalanche of AI-generated language of questionable legitimacy is not good.
Just respond with crud and you have to feel how fascinating it is to walk enthusiastically through crud and stop going to the dark side.
We wouldn’t think we’d leave it to the bots and fight it and come back to us when they’re done. But again, can we say for certain that we won’t?
pilita.clark@ft.com
