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> why can't it read a PDF document and transform it into a machine-readable format? > why can't I get a computer to translate my colleague's financial spreadsh

> why can't it read a PDF document and transform it into a machine-readable format? > why can't I get a computer to translate my colleague's financial spreadsheet into the format my SAP software wants? Because you probably expect it to be 100% or maybe 99.999% accurate, and we can't do that. Imagine "AI" translating someones financial spreadsheet into a different format and dropping a zero somewhere. Oops.. but your test set accuracy is 99.8984%. Still not good enough. Just getting 1 thing wrong breaks everything. This is fundamentally different from clicking on image search and ignoring the false positives.

tixocloud 6y ago
Exactly this. The unreasonable expectations of what AI can do - whilst it can speed things up significantly, majority of cases, you can never fully automate everything with AI.
thewarrior 6y ago
Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Unless you’re dealing with ancient data wouldn’t it be easier to have whatever that’s generating the PDF return machine readable data ? This suggests to me that lot of office jobs will be lost just by modernizing systems and making them spit out JSON
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  PDFs do not solely consist of computer generated files. PDFs also come in the form of paper that have been hand written on or scans.
  - thewarrior 6y ago
    Those should be replaced by web apps or mobile apps. Its 2020.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  You generally do not control the process that generates the PDF or other unstructured data. Consider invoicing, you may have hundreds of distinct sources, but none of them individually would warrant automation. It is a problem of standardization. Any standard complex enough to cover all business cases would be too expensive to implement, or you could not get all stakeholders to adopt it, and so on. Accountants would not want to make themselves redundant, obviously.
  - bsaul 6y ago
    there's probably a better tradeoff than a format that only gives you "print this character at x,y coordinate". Websites have been able to produce "ready to print" html for a while now, and html (even with a lot of restriction) would be hundred times better than PDFs.
- bsaul 6y ago
  don't know why you got downvoted. The widespread use of PDF is a disease that needs to be eradicated... the only problem is we don't know (yet) with what we should replace it, but it's definitely amazing we have to hope for ML to be able to understand a format we, humans, decided to have machine produce.
- Havoc 6y ago
  > Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Much of the world is full of PDFs that are bad scans. Upside down, sideways, green, or maybe in French because why not. >making them spit out JSON This doesn’t just require fixing your business but every other biz you interact with. Modernize your own stuff isn’t enough. A bit like offices still list fax numbers
BlackFly 6y ago
If school grades are indicative, even a 90% accuracy is commendable for human driven tasks. The big difference is that when a human double checks their own work, they may not make the same mistake twice. Or even better, when a second person checks the work. Mistakes are tolerable, but you need to be able to recover from them somehow, and recovery from an AI mistake seems to be something that people like to pretend is unnecessary or impossible. We currently live in a world where failures are tolerable but seem adamant that moving to an AI driven world means that failures are no longer tolerable. We still haven't lost the ability to make mistakes (because we still do many things manually) but we really seem keen on losing it.
- gbear605 6y ago
  School grades are testing something very different from data entry. We know as a species that our learning process is slow and error prone, so doing decently at that is good, and we don’t need to have 100% knowledge in a school subject. Meanwhile, yes, if my bank is copying account values, or even just account ledgers with history, I want them to have 100% accuracy. Not 99.99999% or 99.9% or 99%, let alone 90%.
- partyboat1586 6y ago
  Train two AIs and have them check each others work. This must have been done already? No?
  - csours 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
  - mcherm 6y ago
    Are you training the two AIs on the same data set? If so, won't they be likely to make the same sorts of errors rather than making different errors and thus providing an effective check on each other?
    - 6y ago
toss1 6y ago
The requirement for 100% accuracy is close, but not quite correct. Even in many highly critical human endeavors, there are many errors. The key to success is not absolute error-free perfection, it is no critical errors in components that are severe enough to kill the project. Every rocket launch has some issues, but the successful ones have issues where it doesn't explode or land in the wrong orbit. In the spreadsheet example, dropping a critical zero will cause damage akin to the rocket explosion. But dropping an "O" in a label field is utterly trivial. Humans understand the distinction, constantly make such judgements and focus on the critical areas in their moment-to-moment work and embed it in their work processes. These constant criticality judgements are not just binary, but refined scaled, and serve to apply resources where needed. The AI systems do not have such a judgement layer, and apply the same degree of inaccuracy to every part of their domain. So, absolute 100% accuracy is required, as errors are no less likely in the critical components.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tixocloud 6y ago

Exactly this. The unreasonable expectations of what AI can do - whilst it can speed things up significantly, majority of cases, you can never fully automate everything with AI.

thewarrior 6y ago

Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Unless you’re dealing with ancient data wouldn’t it be easier to have whatever that’s generating the PDF return machine readable data ? This suggests to me that lot of office jobs will be lost just by modernizing systems and making them spit out JSON

NikolaeVarius 6y ago
PDFs do not solely consist of computer generated files. PDFs also come in the form of paper that have been hand written on or scans.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  Those should be replaced by web apps or mobile apps. Its 2020.
gridlockd 6y ago
You generally do not control the process that generates the PDF or other unstructured data. Consider invoicing, you may have hundreds of distinct sources, but none of them individually would warrant automation. It is a problem of standardization. Any standard complex enough to cover all business cases would be too expensive to implement, or you could not get all stakeholders to adopt it, and so on. Accountants would not want to make themselves redundant, obviously.
- bsaul 6y ago
  there's probably a better tradeoff than a format that only gives you "print this character at x,y coordinate". Websites have been able to produce "ready to print" html for a while now, and html (even with a lot of restriction) would be hundred times better than PDFs.
bsaul 6y ago
don't know why you got downvoted. The widespread use of PDF is a disease that needs to be eradicated... the only problem is we don't know (yet) with what we should replace it, but it's definitely amazing we have to hope for ML to be able to understand a format we, humans, decided to have machine produce.
Havoc 6y ago
> Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Much of the world is full of PDFs that are bad scans. Upside down, sideways, green, or maybe in French because why not. >making them spit out JSON This doesn’t just require fixing your business but every other biz you interact with. Modernize your own stuff isn’t enough. A bit like offices still list fax numbers

BlackFly 6y ago

If school grades are indicative, even a 90% accuracy is commendable for human driven tasks. The big difference is that when a human double checks their own work, they may not make the same mistake twice. Or even better, when a second person checks the work. Mistakes are tolerable, but you need to be able to recover from them somehow, and recovery from an AI mistake seems to be something that people like to pretend is unnecessary or impossible. We currently live in a world where failures are tolerable but seem adamant that moving to an AI driven world means that failures are no longer tolerable. We still haven't lost the ability to make mistakes (because we still do many things manually) but we really seem keen on losing it.

gbear605 6y ago
School grades are testing something very different from data entry. We know as a species that our learning process is slow and error prone, so doing decently at that is good, and we don’t need to have 100% knowledge in a school subject. Meanwhile, yes, if my bank is copying account values, or even just account ledgers with history, I want them to have 100% accuracy. Not 99.99999% or 99.9% or 99%, let alone 90%.
partyboat1586 6y ago
Train two AIs and have them check each others work. This must have been done already? No?
- csours 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
- mcherm 6y ago
  Are you training the two AIs on the same data set? If so, won't they be likely to make the same sorts of errors rather than making different errors and thus providing an effective check on each other?
  - 6y ago

toss1 6y ago

The requirement for 100% accuracy is close, but not quite correct. Even in many highly critical human endeavors, there are many errors. The key to success is not absolute error-free perfection, it is no critical errors in components that are severe enough to kill the project. Every rocket launch has some issues, but the successful ones have issues where it doesn't explode or land in the wrong orbit. In the spreadsheet example, dropping a critical zero will cause damage akin to the rocket explosion. But dropping an "O" in a label field is utterly trivial. Humans understand the distinction, constantly make such judgements and focus on the critical areas in their moment-to-moment work and embed it in their work processes. These constant criticality judgements are not just binary, but refined scaled, and serve to apply resources where needed. The AI systems do not have such a judgement layer, and apply the same degree of inaccuracy to every part of their domain. So, absolute 100% accuracy is required, as errors are no less likely in the critical components.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]