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I can't wait for gradual improvements in deep learning allow video calls to extrapolate my presence for longer and longer time segments, until my connection can

I can't wait for gradual improvements in deep learning allow video calls to extrapolate my presence for longer and longer time segments, until my connection can drop out for minutes and WebRTC will make it convincingly seem like I'm still participating in the meeting, making reasonable suggestions for possible code architectures and screen sharing hallucinated PowerPoint presentations. More seriously I worry about cases where it hallucinates the wrong part of a word and changes the meaning of what I was trying to say. Although we kind of already live in this world with phone autocorrect and it's mostly fine. I'm weird though and disable autocorrect on my phone so that when I make a typo it's obviously a typo instead of just saying a plausible but wrong thing.

jjoonathan 7y ago
It was easy to tell when autocorrect switched to machine learning approaches: instead of getting the basics correct and occasionally missing long words or proper names, it immediately and aggressively began to attack correct sentences, committing grade-school grammar mistakes on your behalf if you weren't vigilant enough to catch it in the act and revert its "helpful" changes.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Or photocopiers changing numbers on you because the compression algo thought that 6 was an 8: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23588202 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23588202
- jcims 7y ago
  I tried a couple of times to use Dragon Naturally Speaking to author reports for work. I quickly realized it never made a spelling error, but that definitely didn’t mean that it was 100% correct. I ended up having to read backwards through the report in order to pick up mod most of the errors. Ultimately it was way too much work and too high risk for customer facing content, so I would use it every now and then help me unblock my thinking for a particular topic, but I had to resort to typing for the real deal.
squeaky-clean 7y ago
> More seriously I worry about cases where it hallucinates the wrong part of a word and changes the meaning of what I was trying to say. Xerox had this issue in 2013 https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-randomly-replacing-numbers-in-documents https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-rand... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238
chrisco255 7y ago
Why the duck would you do that?

jjoonathan 7y ago

It was easy to tell when autocorrect switched to machine learning approaches: instead of getting the basics correct and occasionally missing long words or proper names, it immediately and aggressively began to attack correct sentences, committing grade-school grammar mistakes on your behalf if you weren't vigilant enough to catch it in the act and revert its "helpful" changes.

Scoundreller 7y ago
Or photocopiers changing numbers on you because the compression algo thought that 6 was an 8: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23588202 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23588202
jcims 7y ago
I tried a couple of times to use Dragon Naturally Speaking to author reports for work. I quickly realized it never made a spelling error, but that definitely didn’t mean that it was 100% correct. I ended up having to read backwards through the report in order to pick up mod most of the errors. Ultimately it was way too much work and too high risk for customer facing content, so I would use it every now and then help me unblock my thinking for a particular topic, but I had to resort to typing for the real deal.

squeaky-clean 7y ago

> More seriously I worry about cases where it hallucinates the wrong part of a word and changes the meaning of what I was trying to say. Xerox had this issue in 2013 https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-randomly-replacing-numbers-in-documents https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-rand... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238

chrisco255 7y ago

Why the duck would you do that?