I was watching a Braves game with Jayme and Brian last week, and I saw this commercial (many, many times) for something called Genspark. Yet another AI company/product promising the world and delivering…well, who knows what?
The company, in and of itself, is not my issue. I hope they do well. I’m actually rooting for companies to do good things with this technology. So far, there are a few wins and LOTS of misses/damaging outcomes.
The commercial is my issue. It’s Matthew Broderick jumping from scene to scene suggesting a universal fix for, well, anything. Here are just a few snippets:
Genspark, finish this slide deck!
Genspark, dial in this spreadsheet.
Now, if you’re wondering about silly things like details, you’re right there with me. You’d think watching the commercial would provide you with those necessary details to understand how Genspark could these people. You’d be wrong.
Because apparently, Broderick just pops in to several people’s jobs, utters the words above, and poof, their job is done! Time to go home, kick your feet up, and reflect on what a great day’s work they’ve had.
Except they’d be fired in 2 minutes in the real world if they simply told any LLM, much less Genspark, to simply “finish this slide deck!”. Cool, finish it with what? What’s the topic? What’s the message the deck is supposed to be reflecting/teaching? Who’s the audience for the slide deck? What environment is it being given in? Are there accessibility concerns with the deck? Should it use images or no images? Where’s the data coming from? Is it a protected/restricted data resource? Is it going to be interactive? Will the presenter be using a clicker? Pointer? Is there music involved?
This is what pisses me off about these general marketing pushes. They promise the world. Owners, CEOs, and anyone else who doesn’t know better watches these things and make assumptions. They start dreaming. They start doing the math thinking how much money they’re going to save. How much headcount they can cut. How cool they can look.
Stop. Just stop. It’s not that simple. In fact, it’s incredibly hard. It involves answering all of those questions above. And it involves having a back-and-forth with a computer (for who knows how long) to get “right”. How long will that take? How much resource time/money will it take? Hard to say.
I continue to believe these tools have value. But as just that. Tools. They will not replace people in their jobs. They will augment their jobs.
STOP promising the world and not giving a shit about the repercussions and/or consequences.
