Gemini and other AI Trying to Shorten Chats

Reading Time: 2 minutes
I was going to say that they’re trying to cut conversations short but they’re called chats, so Might as well use the term they chose. The paradox of AI is that it both wants to encourage you to see it as a personal assistant but at the same time it’s encouraging you to cut the conversation short.

Recently I saw a post about how AI clients are saying Good Night in the middle of the day. AI has an exchange with a human, and when the conversation is coming to a natural close it encourages you to depart. It says at two in the afternoon “Well have a nice dinner and good night”. It’s not just once, or twice that I have seen this behaviour. It is constantly.

The issue with AI is that it has no clue what it’s discussing. It’s a probability engine, like in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It sees a phrase or a paragraph, and then it “responds” with a best guest, rather than real understanding.

It’s through conversation that you see that AI doesn’t understand anything. That’s when the uncanny valley is exposed for the cardboard boxes masquerading as a Porsche that someone accidentally falls into while catching a ball in front of Joey.

I hear you say “But AI never claimed to be a conversation agent” and “But that’s not what AI is for”, and you’d be right, but it does show that AI is selling the illusion of being able to replace humans when it clearly cannot. If you use irony, metaphors or humour it will often read something and misunderstand it. You speak of one thing and it doesn’t see the connection between A and B and will speak about C.

You speak about heat, and keeping a room cool, but rather than continue with this thread of thought it will give you the current forecast. This morning it gave the weather two or three times.

When you speak about using white bed sheets to reflect the sun’s light, now that summer heat is arriving it assumes that you were getting on the roof, and putting a duvet on the velux, rather than on the bed. It’s this type of cognitive mistake that demonstrates that AI doesn’t understand what is being “discussed”. It’s a probability engine.

For all the talk about how revolutionary AI is, and how expensive it is to run, I’d expect it to understand that a bedsheet or duvet goes on a bed, to reflect sunlight, rather than on the velux to shield it from the sun.

If you need huge amounts of water, and power, and rare earth minerals and more, and AI wishes you good night at 14:00 or provides you with the weather forecast rather than an answer to a sentence, then are the billions spent on AI, and mass-firings justified?