The AI craze has been mostly a great nuisance to me this year. I rely on a Microsoft Surface laptop -- PC/Windows all the way around here, sorry! --and have gradually come to accept Microsoft's Edge and Bing and OneDrive for browser and search engine and backup. But with Microsoft being quick to AI and to incorporating AI in everything, I've been feeling like a unwilling test dummy most of the year.
When I'm working in Word, Microsoft's AI "helpers" have seem to pop up at the most inconvenient times, cluttering my screen and trying to give me advise and support I don't want. I spent too much time this year trying get MS Office out of my way: seeking how to close, block, and shut down help services I was not asking for.
And when I did a quick search for something, Bing, instead of providing the most likely search responses, seemed determined to give me its own little potted summary of what AI knews about the matter, almost always in a form that looked like sophomoric Wikipedia articles from a couple of decades ago. (These days, Wikipedia is pretty impressive a lot of the time, I'd say). AI, obviously, was simply compiling what the internet knew, and on a lot of things I wanted to know, what the internet provided simply not very sophisticated -- indeed sometimes seemed simply to be a uncredited paraphrase of Wikipedia. I was learning to ignore all the first listed items on Bing to get to the genuine article.
At my end, artificial intelligence seemed to be mostly artificial trivia.
One big exception. From time to time I do interviewing over the phone, and the problem of keeping notes, making recordings, and getting transcripts was always a problem. A couple of years ago I discovered Otter.ai, a web-based recording and transcribing service. Initiate a phone call, turn on Otter, and not only do you get a sound recording but on the laptop screen you can see the transcript of the conversation creating itself in real time as you talk.
Except. Otter transcripts were terrible. It just did not hear very well, and introduced such an enormous amount of word salad into its texts as to make revision almost as tedious as typing one's one transcript while listening to a recording. (Almost. I still used Otter.)
Anyway, this week I was doing a bunch more interviews with historians for an article, for the first time in a year. And damned if Otter has not improved markedly while I've been away. Listening to and transcribing and seeing the corrections of many millions of words, AI does indeed "learn." These transcripts still make spectacular mondegreens (eg, your interviewee says "the Asian community" and you see "age infirmity" appear on the developing transcript). But not nearly so many as it did very recently, though doubtless more than it will be creating in a few more months.
Which is to say: if you need transcripts, give yourself a Christmas present and sign up to one of these services and see how it works. (This is not really a commercial for Otter. There are lots of competing services, and no doubt something similar will be incorporated in the Microsoft Office suite (and the Apple equivalent) and will drive all the standalone ones out of business. Take your pick.) But AI is not entirely a nuisance and a threat.
That it for this blog for 2023, I think -- a year we are probably willing to put behind us. This blog will return in 2024, no doubt.
