Comment by GuB-42
9 hours ago
To make things clear, even though I am not a golfer, I have a lot of respect for good secretaries, that's why I said they can do much more than write formal letters. Not only they don't hallucinate like LLMs but they can actually catch mistakes before they happen.
I just wanted to point out the seemingly ridiculous idea of formal communication that none of the interested parties actually read. It is as if two English speakers insisted for the discussion to be in Spanish, and they both brought an interpreter for that.
I think I understand that, which is why I specifically singled out your suggestion that "AI is not the problem" instead of your comment as a whole. Automated processes of Person A talking to automated processes of Person B is not a novel concept. It's been going on in various forms since computers have been invented. You call an Uber and get your phone to talk to Uber's servers and the driver's phone so you don't have to talk to the driver, same with Doordash and the restaurant, same with Amazon and the retail store personnel. In these cases the back and forth between two humans are, as in your words, a type of "formal communication that none of the interested parties actually read" or "two English speakers both bringing Spanish interpreters to talk to each other."
It's this way because us nerds want to remove the need to talk to other humans in order obtain what our hearts' desire at any given point. So we have been trying to remove non-deterministic roadblocks (humans) and replace them with deterministic automation from the very beginning. This is not new. If LLMs were the same deterministic processes but 1000x more versatile and capable then it wouldn't be a problem.
But even though LLMs have lowered the barrier on who can create these automated processes and the speed at which these automated processes are created, to achieve this they brought with them non-deterministic side effects that currently evade a holistic and deterministic fix. This is why it's an AI problem.