ChatGPT

Whoever programmed my supposedly-intelligent SatNav has never driven an actual car. This morning I had to turn on off the A123 onto the M456. "Take the exit onto Mumsnet Boulevard, A123" (the road I was already on - it's a filter lane) "... follow signs for city centre, Parentsville" (which are eventual turnings in the opposite direction to the M456). "Use the left two lanes to merge onto Brick Way, B789." That's the 300-yard M456 approach road. "Go straight for 23 miles". By now I'm on the M456, which the SatNav hasn't mentioned once. All this is quite confusing, as it's a big 25- to 30-lane junction (though actually just a crossroads). I don't need to know the road names, the contents of the signs or any A or B numbers. Just say "Take the exit and follow signs onto the M456," which is shown on every sign. Worst back-seat driver I ever had.

Might as well give Trump the codes. The human race is done.

I absolutely love Chat GpT. It’s my new friend, I talk to it all the time!

I find the social questions interesting with GPT, as in if you ask it one month if a man can become a woman it says one thing and a month or two later something that lands quite differently and is more opaque. I know it has to go on what it is being fed but it is an interesting insight on changing opinions in society as a whole.

You had referred to just the power being off, and mentioned an actual power outtage of three hours. To the best of my knowledge there has never been a targeted EMP strike, though the effects have occurred in thunderstorms etc

My team has experienced an equipment loss due to a similar natural incident, and thus a loss of a capability / feature of the team, a loss of an occasional income stream and a significant financial loss to the member who built that equipment **

Even targeted EMPs would not be as Hollywood predicts, but would be at varying levels

All of the tech people are unilaterally incapable of explaining what happens when the power goes off.
I don't mean apocalyptically, just off.
We had a power outage at work that knocked the internet off for about four hours, and the whole business ground to a halt. No printers, no documents saving or opening, no AI.

If we go for planning for an EMP, then we’ll go back to a risk assessment - not to forget the likelihood and therefore the cost/benefit of mitigations

Firstly a directed EMP and/or power grid surge don’t just affect electronics. There is the risk of electrocution and fire. So a risk to life of the staff. That’s not an IT departments risk but the whole business risk

The battery element itself isn’t affected by an EMP, but the electronic control/safety systems in laptop batteries is
If a credible risk to the business then an IT department can do pretty much nothing to protect anything in use - they can propose spare laptops and batteries to be stored in faraday cages. This is not just the cost of additional equipment but it needs to be maintained with updates, or will add to delay in getting back up & running.
You would also need assurance that your access to a remote server etc is protected, and may need to therefore run your own server that is EMP protected, generators, surge protection etc

Your business could save the IT department a headache by getting the infrastructure department to mitigate the risk by placing the business in a deep underground bunker or under a mountain. Those will be pricey though and staff might not be keen in working in those environments, adding to HR costs and potential health & sickness issues of working in other environments

** Real life scenario:

I’m one of the founder members of a paintball team, we have run our own events, run parts of other people’s events and we have a technology genius.
One of their builds, covering a at least £1500 in parts, was an automated sentry gun, (on topic it includes AI target identification - we still have its AI data)
We used this at our events as an objective to bypass/defeat and either rented it to other events or got free entry to other events, It is also ‘as seen on TV’ when we provided it for a movie myth TV show

We often left it stored at the site we were associated with, which is less than 5 miles from my office

One day we heard what sounded like an explosion - a bit worrying as I work for the MoD, but it turned out to be a lighting strike …. About 5 miles away
Lightning hit the power at the substation beside the site, surged through the underground cable and blew the power input to the site office & store, resulting in a fire.
Our sentry gun was in the store
The site as a business survived, it was a former mushroom farm and it already had plans to expand a function/party building which was revised to new office etc, and with the insurance was able to reinvest in new equipment. Fire damaged mushroom tunnels were made safe, partially restored and the remaining damage became ‘game features’
Our sentry gun was not directly covered, but would have been paid for if we had bought it, as it had been built a fraction of the costs were recovered.

The sites business risk assessment worked with insurance that covered restoring most of the business but were lucky enough on their financial backing to be able to ride the storm until resolved, combined with the nature of the activity being able to continue.

A less dramatic example is my friends sons office was closed following a fire in a different business on the ground floor. He arrived one morning to barrier tape forbidding entry until the building was declared safe.
This was post Covid, so they had hybrid working, and cloud servers. Those with their laptops were just sent home, those who’s laptops were upstairs just had to wait for IT to buy some and configure them

No, as in, no electricity system at all. EMP strike, solar flare etc, so batteries would not work. Without electricity all tech is useless.

I think you will find it got rid of you because you expressed right wing views.

I got rid of it as it expressed left wing views!

They all hallucinate.

I plugged in some info last night to test it for a 5 day trip to New York. Gave it some ideas, times of flights etc and it made an absolute mess of it, somehow believing there were 6 full days between the 30th Oct and the 3rd November and even when I pointed it out it didn’t change anything. Even it’s “optimised” option had us zig zagging all over the city.

It’s sat nav all over again. Remember all the people driving along railway tracks and into rivers because “sat nav said so”?

it’s been proven to be really poor when it comes to legal advice and women’s health in particular, and yet it’s becoming “a best friend” (ffs).

and that’s before the environmental catastrophe.

still, DH is making a fortune correcting AI-generated code, so silver linings. 🤷🏻‍♀️

A new career in fixing "AI" is growing. I'd all it "AI Wrangling".

However we are already at the stage where if your "AI" gets it wrong, your company is much more likely to blame you for using it wrong than the tool they have staked their company on .....

I find it most useful for summarising information I already know in a neat package.

I find it excellent and have no problem with it. Everything from techy questions, holidays, writing difficult letters, interpreting my medical results, designing posters etc. etc.
It is my go-to with any tech fault - I go there first rather than the manufacturer's website.

It's worrying because so many people are using it for important things and don't seem to realise how much it gets wrong. I saw something about lawyers using chatgpt in court, and citing fake cases that chatgpt had made up!

Exactly
DawnInTheAge brought up that their IT people were “incapable” of explaining what happens when the power went off.

Their example of a power cut was quite clear - Everything that relied on power stopped working

Whether or not the IT department and/or the management had already considered that is a different matter. They may have dealt with their critical elements
Perhaps their ‘incapable’ element was actually the IT people referring them to their manager for ‘what to do’

Back onto AI, MS CoPilots answer is that in a 3 hour power failure an office (which it has placed into context my office and linked relevant documents) is to :

1)Refer to our “actions in the event of a power outage” - which covers site services
2)Switch to backup power
3)Implement our branch/team “Business continuity plan”

It goes on to cover co-ordination and communication plans, and the steps to take when power is restored (checking systems, a post outage review, updating procedures etc following the review)

I rarely have problems with ChatGPT, I have its ‘memory’ on and the first tier subscription, and it solves so many issues; domestic tech, creating letters to solicitors, creating long term plans, finance, grief support, meal planning, puppy training, creative support - there’s not much it hasn’t helped me with.

You have to be canny with your inputs and correct it if it makes mistakes.

The main problem I had (but it seems ok now) was that it kept going Welsh! It heard what I said as Welsh, and responded in Welsh. We had a few run ins over the Welsh. He, I mean It, behaves much better now. It’s the best friend I have.

Is there any reason they didn't pit it against a half decent coder ? That would have reset the average to about -50.

@Tomikka- quite, but of course all those solutions require management requirements and budget not just IT. What is desirable or necessary for one type of organisation isn’t for another. For a small company/department doing something that isn’t time critical (and no risk to life or limb!) the cost effective solution to a three hour power outage may be for everyone to have an afternoon off. For others it might be to do some reading or a physical office tidy up.

Not sure what the question has to do with AI except of course the humans might be able to do something useful whereas AI systems are dead in the water without power.

To be more precise, two swimmers proved a lack of human intelligence using ChatGPTs text generation application to tell them tide times. Reporting does not state which version of ChatGPT they used, but whatever one they used will have found historic tide times and given an answer

ChatGPT is not a search engine, nor is it a tidal calculator

People regularly get caught out there by the tide, whether they used ChatGPT or not

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/restaurant-boss-saw-two-people-32685476?int_source=amp_continue_reading&int_medium=amp&int_campaign=continue_reading_button#amp-readmore-target

Note that they further added to their lack of human intelligence by attempting to swim through the rising tide

@Dawnintheageofaquariams
@Lifeisnotalwaysfair

In a total power failure I would expect the IT department to say that their servers shutdown in a clean manner via a UPS, or their highly critical servers/systems switched cleanly to the expensive backup generation

I would have expected a risk assessment to have been conducted, (covering the likelihood of an incident plus the severity of impact - with a seperate risk matrix per risk/system) mitigations assessed and proposed to management with prioritisation against cost.

In classic desktop networks I would have put in UPS interruptable power supplies that had enough battery backup to initiate and complete a server shutdown.
Unless highly critical I would not worry about the network switches, desktops, printers but if critical to life / existence of the business I would prioritise each and have additional UPS to keep those going - which would effectively need a generator to kick in
(I would consider active user files against the operating systems ability to preserve versions across the network/cloud and/or be able to recover the latest copy that was in use as computers crashed)

In the laptop age the laptops battery would be expected to just continue, (for its battery life), therefore it would be more affordable to have a mitigation that kept the network running
An alternative mitigation is to let the network connection drop but have the contingency for users to tether their mobile phones, which would last as long as the battery life. Perhaps top that up with a cupboard of power banks and cables

In the age of cloud computing the IT department could use cloud servers, in which eases their need to physically manage and protect a local server but at the cost of a cloud managed system.
With your business network on the cloud then a local power outtage could be easily mitigated by laptop batteries and phone tethering, followed by leaving the site to elsewhere / home where there may be power, WiFi etc

I would not care about printers, but if printing remains critical I used to have a mobile battery powered full colour inkjet. I have not seen any of those around for years, with the nearest thing being heat transfer sticker printers and some A4 heat transfer printers

The IT departments answer would be to follow the action plan and their proposed mitigations

Did anyone watch Dispatches on C4? They pitted Chat GPT against a GP, Lawyer, Musician and Fashion Photographer. Considering this isn't a tailored AI system for each specialism it almost matched the professionals, with the noticeable outliers being the Musician and Lawyer (although that is just about not having been fed the precedents and protocol IMO, literally made for the legal legwork if you ask me!). In all cases it was far cheaper and faster than the human.

The gov need to come up with something for about 60% of us to do for ££ in the next 5-10 years I reckon! I'm secretly looking forward to the GP AI being fully trained up and ready to go, I think female healthcare will finally really improve.

That’s the artificial part of artificial intelligence
No AI is intelligent

Your example of memorising time tables is a perfect example. A child doing their times tables covers both repetition and vocalising, which are two methods of embedding each times table sequence into the brains neural network.

You can then recognise a calculation & recall its position in the sequence. A trained model does exactly the same thing to remember the pattern sequence into a neural network, and then when you ask the question ChatGPT reads the patterns of the words in the question and looks into its neural network to ‘artificially’ understand the context of the question to then come up with a suitable answer.

A child who only learns their times tables off by heart does not understand the calculation, and ChatGPT can perfectly recreate that by not understanding the calculation.
That then would qualify under the Turing test

Didn't someone just got stuck on island because chatgpt gave them wrong tide times?
I trust absolute no facts it provides.
It is however handy with images when I want to show an idea to DH, even though I usually have to argie with it a lot. Like "rotate that chair so it is facing the table" "image created" chair is still back to the table. I have up afyer 5 tries😂EVEN SIMS 1 COULD ROTATE CHAIR

The power has gone off, what are you expecting them to say?

All of the tech people are unilaterally incapable of explaining what happens when the power goes off.
I don't mean apocalyptically, just off.
We had a power outage at work that knocked the internet off for about four hours, and the whole business ground to a halt. No printers, no documents saving or opening, no AI.

I don’t consider that to be particularly intelligent. It’s like training times tables by rote and thinking that people who know them understand maths.