The I in AI
I was on a Zoom call last week and noticed a new AI Companion button in the toolbar. Nothing surprising: if Zoom can add a feature, Zoom will add the feature. As long as they can eventually upsell you on it. Anyhoo, I was curious to see what it would do and… Wow.
The tool is meant to summarize a meeting, but we'd been chatting for about five minutes, and this is what it gave us: “Patrick La Roque wondered what the AI button would do. Nothing meaningful was discussed”.
Wait a minute…
Imagine a brainstorming session. Your assistant is sitting in, notepad in hand. But when you ask for a quick recap, you're told they didn't write anything down because no one said anything interesting. Uh, What?
We weren't drooling and humming to ourselves: I can assure you that words were spoken, wrapped into full sentences meant to convey information—you know, a human conversation. Meaningful? Well, I guess that's debatable, but a few topics DID come up; Zoom's “companion” was clearly just too dumb to extract any of it. But see, the point of AI lies in the “I”: we're meant to believe these are intelligent assistants. Illusion sells. So, instead of admitting it failed to understand, the system simply informs us that we didn't say anything. Cool. Helpful? No. Intelligent? Fuck no.
That's what most troubles me with these so-called tools: their assertiveness. Answers are given the veneer of fact, of authority. It doesn't matter what we actually said; or that a book cited as a source exists or not; or that Australia is a real place, with real people. These are not the droids you’re looking for.
In an era of pervasive disinformation, how is this in any way helpful?
I'm not trying to be negative. There's genuine potential in this technology. But it lies elsewhere, and it's a highly complex issue with profound human and social implications. These rickety add-ons, popping up all over the place, are gimmicks, feeding a hype machine while also gorging themselves on the same fuel. They ultimately succeed only at muddying the truth—on too many levels.
Bread and circuses, disguised as productivity.
While nothing meaningful is ever discussed…
