Bloopers & News 11/22/24
A fake grandma doing the Lord's work.
Today is a hodge-podge of news that has caught my eye. I’ll begin with the delicious story of a company called O2 using AI to help waste the time of scammers.
O2 has created human-like Daisy, an AI ‘Granny’ to answer calls in real time from fraudsters, keeping them on the phone and away from customers for as long as possible.
Isn’t that fantastic? I’m always relieved to read a story about AI that makes me smile.
Next is the over-hyped news that Coca-Cola has made all of their Christmas ads using AI. My first reaction was that I didn’t think the ads were going to give them the “no way!” reaction they were hoping for, but it got them a lot of press, so some publicity committee somewhere was toasting with weak rum and Cokes.
Coke’s announcement suggested that they were releasing the ads in the spirit of “we love cool new tech!” but we all know they saved millions by getting rid of actors, sets, animators, and all semblance of humanity.
But don’t worry - the celebration of the publicity committee was definitely short lived. Just watch this video with clips of the ad and people responding on social media (spoiler: the word “creepy” is used many times.)
The third story is good news . . . maybe? JusticeText “has developed technology that uses generative AI to help overworked public defenders and defense attorneys quickly get through all that video footage.”
Turns out that putting cameras on cops is a great idea, but the sheer amount of footage they produce has made them less effective than we would hope. JusticeText has this to say:
Public defenders are dealing with a very, very intense workload challenge. Not only do they have hundreds of clients at any given moment, but they have hours and hours of footage they need to get through.
We can use natural language processing to flag moments, field sobriety tests, when Miranda rights are read, etc.
Why is this only “maybe” good news? The AI also can provide suggested defense strategies. I don’t about you, but if I’m ever accused of a crime, I want a lawyer who is going to learn about my case, not just enter the details into an app and see what Wall-E thinks.
Nailed It
I don’t claim to be a football expert (or to understand anything at all about it) but I’m fairly sure it is not played with three balls, puddles of water on the field, and half the team floating in zero gravity.
But what do I know?
Lots of discussions in the Enterprise Technology unit at The University of Texas at Austin about the environmental impact and sustainability challenges with the use of AI as it relates to energy usage. What are your thoughts?