Bad deal

Reading more of the AI criticism at MindMatters. Most of the complaints are about the talents and “consciousness” of LLMs, which are utterly irrelevant. Altman WANTS us to be arguing about the degree of creativity and the “consciousness” and the fake threat of grabbing the nuclear button. (Big Data has been on the nuclear button since the 1970s. Nothing new.)

The people who are actually making contracts with Satan Altman don’t care a whit about the talents and “consciousness” and fake threats.

What do they care about? Discussions at crass commercial sites like Bloomberg and NiemanLab reveal a fast-growing disappointment with Altman’s trickery.

News companies have given Altman total access to their ‘morgue’ to use for his own purposes. What do they get in return? Chatbots that DON’T REFER THE READER BACK TO THE NEWS SITE. Instead of boosting AP or WSJ, the chatbots lead readers into random pages that will frustrate them.

Other companies have made contracts with Altman for customer service chatbots, and we know how those work.

Customer service should cement a bond between the customer and the company. Chatbot service makes us hate the company.

What does a customer service bot need to know? It needs to know everything about the company’s products and technical methods. It needs to know the names of the techs and where they are right now and what they can do.

= = = = =

PING! These two deals are the same. Altman gets total access to the company’s soul, its copyrights and patents and employee roster and methods and skills. In return the company gets LOSS OF REPEAT CUSTOMERS.

Duane Jones: Forming a repeat customer is much more EXPENSIVE than keeping a repeat customer. The first sample is free, which means the company has to send out a whole lot of unpaid samples to gain one repeat customer.

The experience of the product itself must be good enough to form an addiction. Then the experience of buying or maintaining the product must be good enough to keep the customer inside your brand. Quality control of product and salesmen and techs is expensive, but quality control is a whole lot cheaper than bankruptcy.

Altman takes the soul and ruins the buying and maintaining experiences in return. He doesn’t directly ruin the product itself, but he now owns the patents and copyrights and methods to make the product, so he could potentially blackmail the company by threatening to reveal the IP.