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To be honest Gmail auto-replies have been amazingly on point for me. The reply options they give me in quick, transactional emails are generally _exactly_ the s

by sulam 8y ago

To be honest Gmail auto-replies have been amazingly on point for me. The reply options they give me in quick, transactional emails are generally _exactly_ the sort of reply I would have typed out, so they save me a lot of time.

dragandj 8y ago
Until you train yourself to respond with such limited set of pre-baked answers to everything!
- sulam 8y ago
  We don't know each other (I don't think!), but trust me, no one who knows me would believe you if you said I'm at risk of that!
  - dragandj 8y ago
    My comment does not implicate that you as a single person necessary have to succumb to this, at least immediately, or that you are not a good person in any way. By you, I implied every person using that technology over time, including me, you, and everyone else. Short-term, we might control this, but over time it is inevitable. Something that is done over and over again becomes automatic. That's called training and conditioning :)
Osmium 8y ago
You can imagine a feedback loop though: Some people use Gmail auto-replies more > Other people therefore receive emails in the style of these auto-replies > These other people then start manually sending emails according to this style > More people then become happier using auto-reply (since it produces replies in a style they've come to expect) In this way, an auto-reply feature, even if used by only a subset of the population would start to move language trends. Maybe there's nothing wrong with this, I don't know. But there is a feedback loop there, which means there's a blurrier line than we'd like between "this AI algorithm does what I'd expect" to "my expectations have become shaped by AI algorithms."
- earthboundkid 8y ago
  This happened to Google Translate. They were scouring the web looking for bilingual corpuses to ingest and they found… texts translated by Google Translate. Things got funky and they had to stop.

by sulam 8y ago

dragandj 8y ago

Until you train yourself to respond with such limited set of pre-baked answers to everything!

sulam 8y ago
We don't know each other (I don't think!), but trust me, no one who knows me would believe you if you said I'm at risk of that!
- dragandj 8y ago
  My comment does not implicate that you as a single person necessary have to succumb to this, at least immediately, or that you are not a good person in any way. By you, I implied every person using that technology over time, including me, you, and everyone else. Short-term, we might control this, but over time it is inevitable. Something that is done over and over again becomes automatic. That's called training and conditioning :)

Osmium 8y ago

You can imagine a feedback loop though: Some people use Gmail auto-replies more > Other people therefore receive emails in the style of these auto-replies > These other people then start manually sending emails according to this style > More people then become happier using auto-reply (since it produces replies in a style they've come to expect) In this way, an auto-reply feature, even if used by only a subset of the population would start to move language trends. Maybe there's nothing wrong with this, I don't know. But there is a feedback loop there, which means there's a blurrier line than we'd like between "this AI algorithm does what I'd expect" to "my expectations have become shaped by AI algorithms."

earthboundkid 8y ago
This happened to Google Translate. They were scouring the web looking for bilingual corpuses to ingest and they found… texts translated by Google Translate. Things got funky and they had to stop.