4 ms·

>> Where’s the positive ad with [...] a businessperson using it to understand a complex report dumped on them minutes before a meeting? There is literally exac

by ethbr1 2y ago

>> Where’s the positive ad with [...] a businessperson using it to understand a complex report dumped on them minutes before a meeting? There is literally exactly that ad. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BK8bnkcT0Ng https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BK8bnkcT0Ng Imho, it's one of the best "Why AI?" ads I've seen so far.

Wowfunhappy 2y ago
Kind of. The guy in this ad is portrayed as a slacker who didn't read the report everyone was expected to read. He presumably received the report well in advance of the meeting, he just didn't bother to look at it. This is very different from someone who was given a report he/she could not possibly have read in time! This guy is the person who uses Sparknotes instead of doing his homework. I'm all for efficiency, but if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report, they'd just have written the summary. Of course, maybe in this brave new world we're living in, the report's author did just write a summary, then used AI to turn it into a multi-page document, which readers used AI to turn back into a summary. Is this what we want?
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > He presumably received the report well in advance of the meeting... Where'd you get that from? That everyone else had read it / lied about reading it?
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    Yeah, the alternative is that everyone else lied and the boss has impossible expectations of his team. That's absolutely possible but not my default assumption.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Realistic alternative: life happens. By my experience, most of other people in that room probably only skimmed the prospectus, but even if they all read it carefully, maybe this one guy had a really busy couple days. Deadlines at work, kids getting sick, etc. With a dozen people in a room, sheer probability demands that every now and then, someone will be unprepared through no fault of their own. In this ad, it happens to be that guy. In other words: beware of fundamental attribution error.
      - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
        Sure, fine, but then the guy could have said "I'm sorry, my kids have been sick all week and I've been working on Project X, I haven't had time to read the Prospectus yet." Instead, he lied. And while I don't think that's some unforgivable crime—there are absolutely circumstances that could justify it—I don't think that's what the ad is portraying. You have to go out and come up with additional external factors which the ad does not provide evidence for. The guy was clearly zoned out and caught off guard. And yeah, maybe that's because he was taking care of a crying newborn all night and is sleep deprived, but that's not the simplest explanation or the one Apple intended for us to think about.
        ethbr1 2y ago
        I think you'd have to go outside what's on the screen to draw any conclusions about how much time everyone else spent reading the prospectus.
- cthor 2y ago
  > if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report, they'd just have written the summary That is not my experience with corporate writing in the slightest.
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    Yes, but... that's bad corporate writing, right? I suppose you could argue that's the reality for many, but it's not what we should aspire to! The solution isn't to add AI summarizers, it's to stop writing BS! Easier said than done, I get it. But I'm scared of AI normalizing this. What happens when no one, even the good writers, can write for actual people any more, because everything is uniformly thrown into an AI?
    - lmm 2y ago
      It's already normalised. If companies were capable of rewarding insight rather than volume they'd be doing it already. If anything, normalising the use of AI to reduce a report to its valuable insights should reduce the incentive to pad out reports.
      - elcritch 2y ago
        Or AI tools will be used to pad out the reports making the author look prolific while knowing everyone will summarize the report to important parts.
        lmm 2y ago
        > Or AI tools will be used to pad out the reports making the author look prolific But everyone will know everyone can do this. So it will stop impressing anyone, maybe.
- matwood 2y ago
  > but if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report I'm curious if you work in a corporate environment. Middle management gets swamped with stuff like this because the person who wrote the reports thinks the longer the better to show off how good they are at their job. Amazon fought this trend with their commonly referred 1-pager and >=6-pagers. I don't have hard rules like Amazon, but one of my common pushbacks on my team is make documents shorter.
sigmar 2y ago
That's not "[understanding] a complex report." It exemplifies the authors point that they're portraying it as "tools for those unwilling to put in any effort." During this meeting, how is that guy going to critique any detail from the prospectus or make any useful contribution from the 20 second summary? I think these LLMs are tremendously useful and the ads undersell them. But I can also appreciate that the ads have to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and showing real workflows in 30sec is difficult.
rockemsockem 2y ago
That guy looks lazy and bad at his job. Compare that ad to this famous Excel ad from the 90s. https://youtu.be/kOO31qFmi9A?si=Ww9i4FCxxpMj3YIs https://youtu.be/kOO31qFmi9A?si=Ww9i4FCxxpMj3YIs The guy in the Excel commercial comes off as cool, confident, and skilled at using Excel. Both ads show off the speed of the tool in high stakes scenarios, but the Apple one makes the user look like an idiot. Also the Apple ad shows everyone with macs, so he has no advantage over everyone else.
- totetsu 2y ago
  its like a French New Wave film
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  That Microsoft ad is 4 minutes long. That's too long to make it unskippable and I'm pretty sure most people would not watch it long enough to reach the punchline.
  - notachatbot123 2y ago
    It would be easy to cut it down to a shorter runtime. This wasn't what OP was talking about though.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It's unclear to me where would you even find such an ad in the wild? 4 minutes is ridiculously long for a single spot, even for TV in 1990s. I'm gonna guess this would be running on a loop on a trade show or something.
    - extraduder_ire 2y ago
      I think its gone out of fashion, but there was a trend for a while to produce a "full length" ad and edit it down to fit in tighter ad slots, or split it into multiple chunks and show parts of it across different ad breaks.
    - Someone 2y ago
moondev 2y ago
Compare to Microsoft Copilot ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWXbd2fKTu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWXbd2fKTu8
thecupisblue 2y ago
All these "why AI" ads, addons, features et al makes me think it's just middle managers having ideas on how to make their jobs easier and work the least while getting credit for bringing AI to the table. Reviewing emails, summarizing meetings, documents, key points, TPS reports. Are these all seriously that impactful? If your job can be condensed into information summarising, then your job can and will be done by the same machine that is doing the summarising for you. Any and all "edge" a human might have in that business (unique insight and perspectives, noticing details that sound okay but actually aren't, human pattern recognition) get lost in the human-AI-AI-human translation. In this commercial, if prospectus was written by AI and is now summarized by AI, what is the point of the people around the table? The ad's should be used to show it's impact to scale the edge instead of scaling generic business bullshit. If your company is a swarm of people using AI to generate all input/output, your company might scale wider but it will (mostly) be doing mediocre work - unless your hires are explicitly good at using AI. If it's mediocre and scaled wide, others can easily create the same output and beat you with pricing. tl;dr; scale the edge, not the middle.

by ethbr1 2y ago

Wowfunhappy 2y ago

Kind of. The guy in this ad is portrayed as a slacker who didn't read the report everyone was expected to read. He presumably received the report well in advance of the meeting, he just didn't bother to look at it. This is very different from someone who was given a report he/she could not possibly have read in time! This guy is the person who uses Sparknotes instead of doing his homework. I'm all for efficiency, but if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report, they'd just have written the summary. Of course, maybe in this brave new world we're living in, the report's author did just write a summary, then used AI to turn it into a multi-page document, which readers used AI to turn back into a summary. Is this what we want?

ethbr1 2y ago
> He presumably received the report well in advance of the meeting... Where'd you get that from? That everyone else had read it / lied about reading it?
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  Yeah, the alternative is that everyone else lied and the boss has impossible expectations of his team. That's absolutely possible but not my default assumption.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Realistic alternative: life happens. By my experience, most of other people in that room probably only skimmed the prospectus, but even if they all read it carefully, maybe this one guy had a really busy couple days. Deadlines at work, kids getting sick, etc. With a dozen people in a room, sheer probability demands that every now and then, someone will be unprepared through no fault of their own. In this ad, it happens to be that guy. In other words: beware of fundamental attribution error.
    - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
      Sure, fine, but then the guy could have said "I'm sorry, my kids have been sick all week and I've been working on Project X, I haven't had time to read the Prospectus yet." Instead, he lied. And while I don't think that's some unforgivable crime—there are absolutely circumstances that could justify it—I don't think that's what the ad is portraying. You have to go out and come up with additional external factors which the ad does not provide evidence for. The guy was clearly zoned out and caught off guard. And yeah, maybe that's because he was taking care of a crying newborn all night and is sleep deprived, but that's not the simplest explanation or the one Apple intended for us to think about.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        I think you'd have to go outside what's on the screen to draw any conclusions about how much time everyone else spent reading the prospectus.
cthor 2y ago
> if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report, they'd just have written the summary That is not my experience with corporate writing in the slightest.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  Yes, but... that's bad corporate writing, right? I suppose you could argue that's the reality for many, but it's not what we should aspire to! The solution isn't to add AI summarizers, it's to stop writing BS! Easier said than done, I get it. But I'm scared of AI normalizing this. What happens when no one, even the good writers, can write for actual people any more, because everything is uniformly thrown into an AI?
  - lmm 2y ago
    It's already normalised. If companies were capable of rewarding insight rather than volume they'd be doing it already. If anything, normalising the use of AI to reduce a report to its valuable insights should reduce the incentive to pad out reports.
    - elcritch 2y ago
      Or AI tools will be used to pad out the reports making the author look prolific while knowing everyone will summarize the report to important parts.
      - lmm 2y ago
        > Or AI tools will be used to pad out the reports making the author look prolific But everyone will know everyone can do this. So it will stop impressing anyone, maybe.
matwood 2y ago
> but if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report I'm curious if you work in a corporate environment. Middle management gets swamped with stuff like this because the person who wrote the reports thinks the longer the better to show off how good they are at their job. Amazon fought this trend with their commonly referred 1-pager and >=6-pagers. I don't have hard rules like Amazon, but one of my common pushbacks on my team is make documents shorter.

sigmar 2y ago

That's not "[understanding] a complex report." It exemplifies the authors point that they're portraying it as "tools for those unwilling to put in any effort." During this meeting, how is that guy going to critique any detail from the prospectus or make any useful contribution from the 20 second summary? I think these LLMs are tremendously useful and the ads undersell them. But I can also appreciate that the ads have to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and showing real workflows in 30sec is difficult.

rockemsockem 2y ago

That guy looks lazy and bad at his job. Compare that ad to this famous Excel ad from the 90s. https://youtu.be/kOO31qFmi9A?si=Ww9i4FCxxpMj3YIs https://youtu.be/kOO31qFmi9A?si=Ww9i4FCxxpMj3YIs The guy in the Excel commercial comes off as cool, confident, and skilled at using Excel. Both ads show off the speed of the tool in high stakes scenarios, but the Apple one makes the user look like an idiot. Also the Apple ad shows everyone with macs, so he has no advantage over everyone else.

totetsu 2y ago
its like a French New Wave film
fxtentacle 2y ago
That Microsoft ad is 4 minutes long. That's too long to make it unskippable and I'm pretty sure most people would not watch it long enough to reach the punchline.
- notachatbot123 2y ago
  It would be easy to cut it down to a shorter runtime. This wasn't what OP was talking about though.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  It's unclear to me where would you even find such an ad in the wild? 4 minutes is ridiculously long for a single spot, even for TV in 1990s. I'm gonna guess this would be running on a loop on a trade show or something.
  - extraduder_ire 2y ago
    I think its gone out of fashion, but there was a trend for a while to produce a "full length" ad and edit it down to fit in tighter ad slots, or split it into multiple chunks and show parts of it across different ad breaks.
  - Someone 2y ago

moondev 2y ago

Compare to Microsoft Copilot ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWXbd2fKTu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWXbd2fKTu8

thecupisblue 2y ago

All these "why AI" ads, addons, features et al makes me think it's just middle managers having ideas on how to make their jobs easier and work the least while getting credit for bringing AI to the table. Reviewing emails, summarizing meetings, documents, key points, TPS reports. Are these all seriously that impactful? If your job can be condensed into information summarising, then your job can and will be done by the same machine that is doing the summarising for you. Any and all "edge" a human might have in that business (unique insight and perspectives, noticing details that sound okay but actually aren't, human pattern recognition) get lost in the human-AI-AI-human translation. In this commercial, if prospectus was written by AI and is now summarized by AI, what is the point of the people around the table? The ad's should be used to show it's impact to scale the edge instead of scaling generic business bullshit. If your company is a swarm of people using AI to generate all input/output, your company might scale wider but it will (mostly) be doing mediocre work - unless your hires are explicitly good at using AI. If it's mediocre and scaled wide, others can easily create the same output and beat you with pricing. tl;dr; scale the edge, not the middle.