For some reason, today turned out to be technocracy and AI day. I was sent a link to a discussion, a so-called technology Round Table, with Courtenay Turner, Patrick Wood, and Iain Davis.
For those concerned with the technological revolution that is rapidly coming upon us, you might care to watch this video but I warn you it is quite demanding, the language is academic and the pace is quick. It is on David A. Hughes’s substack site and I might as well give you the link to the whole thing. Do try and watch it you can, all 2 hours 18 minutes of it.
Here is an article by Patrick Wood. Trust Me, AI Friends Are Not Your Friends, From Technology News and Trends giving various warning signs.
I’m a member of the Bristol WordPress group and this evening we had a talk by Elliott Richmond this evening. The topic was ‘dancing with AI’. Below are my general observations bearing in mind I’m not a software developer rather an end user. In this day and age of noise I very much liked the half hour presentation illustrated by slides some of which you see below.
<rant starts>
This is no reflection on anyone in particular but I found the above introductory announcement very messy – you will note that I’m obsessive with detail so looking at the appearance and setting aside the logo, we have no less than nine different fonts.
It is an example of something put together in a hurry. A mixture can be confusing on the eye and on the brain. If people get confused they will turn elsewhere in a flash. By the way, it’s defended.net
The same confusion applies to the Defended site. It seems a bit bare and it could do with an injection of heart. If I visit https://www.defended.net/contact there is no phone contact number but the link seems to work on the mobile edition. When I click on the E-mail ‘security issues’ or ‘message’ boxes there is no link given. The page https://docs.defended.net/malwatch/ is a complete mess.
The site was thrown in the shopping basket by various people at various times and it does not hang together. Imagine, people, arranging a bunch of flowers. You would step back and look at the whole thing? Why not the same with websites. You don’t focus on one particular flower but on how it looks overall.
I will finish my rant by saying ‘is it too much to ask that people check their website on to three platforms, mobile, tablet, PC, before putting it out there?’. These remarks are not intended as criticism for the sake of it but I’m so fed up with people not following the normal protocol when I’m sure they have a good product to offer.
PS I eventually found the ‘get in touch’ button but I just got back to the non effective ‘contact us’ page. You couldn’t make it up.
<rant over>
However, to defend them, ‘Defended’ did sponsor the event with generous amounts of sandwiches so ‘well done them’ but attention to their architecture and detail of their shop window site would be good. How they hope to convert visitors is a mystery to me.
I decided to write to Defended as follows:
This is the sort of correspondence that enables both parties and indeed the readers to learn from.
However, it looks like you have just glanced at the first couple of stanzas of my letter and I feel I’m getting a knee jerk response, ‘you think we are that, we are actually this’
That is fine as far as it goes but it does leave many avenues unexplored – oh and I’m not saying you have any obligation to take any notice what I’m saying but I can take a guess that the majority of visitors who misunderstand or do not understand a website will just abandon it without engagement.
I can just about understand you’re not having a telephone number because you don’t want frivolous calls but I would have thought that such a site would not attract such calls.
I do not understand the fragmentary nature of the website itself, the awkward spaces, the feeling that different people have contributed in different ways at various times’. I recall the old fashioned phrase ‘dogs dinner’. As I said previously ‘imagine a bunch of flowers’, yours is more a selection of individual flowers rather than a bunch.
No matter how simple the site, there should be a call to action. Your client group will not have the time to spend 10 minutes searching around for a link that works. I reckon the average person spends two minutes max.
I did visit your philosophy page. What has an image of a man with a stick looking out at a rough sea got to do with anything? The text is too slogan based and not authoritative; when I want to get through to contact you I was led to three boxes, two of which do not function. My software is up to date and I was testing using Opera and Firefox.
Your Malwatch > documentation page has a dreadful heading which you can hardly read and may I draw your attention to the first paragraph.
Malwatch is a fast and lightweight malware scanner written in go (?) that is ideal for Linux based web server environments. Minimal resource usage and performance are some of its key design objectives. Signatures are written as yara (?).
My comment: go and yara when clicked lead nowhere so I dont know what they are all about. Maybe its a secret code 🙂
Overall I feel that you are living in an esoteric bubble and you do not have a robust reach out to your chosen group. Also, the site is the only way a party has of evaluating you so what sort of opinion are they forming about your attention to detail?
It looks like the site was created by an amateur so you could seek a qualified developer to spend a couple of hours tiding up the look and feel of the site including the architecture of the menu bar which currently causes people to go around in circles.
No need to reply to this letter.
I’m just telling you the way I see it. No judgement – just pragmatism. I look at hundreds of sites each day, and after a time I do get a pretty good feel of what will work and what will fall by the wayside.
Regards and good luck, Brian
And now to the talk
Given by an affable Elliott Richmond, see his site elliottrichmond.co.uk He started with WordPress 20 years ago, almost as long as WordPress has been around. He is a theme and plugin developer and very much in to sharing tips, tutorials and insights. A man after my own heart. Well done Elliott.
This is a subsidiary existing user platform to the main customer facing business Squareone Software. You can find all of his social links and email link on his personal website above, the icons above the subscribe field. He features in a video ‘15 WordPress Pro Developers You should follow in 2024. Join at 4:03
Elliott also finds time to organise a WordPress meetup group in Cheltenham, helping to foster a local community of enthusiasts.
Beccy H who is on the WP Bristol committee has shared the slides themselves on Slideshre. here
In my view – Every tool can be used and abused and we are at the stage now where two things are happening,
# AI is being developed at huge speed
# The general public have grasped maybe 5% of its implications on a good day
AI is well on the way to being the cause of a paradigm shift and a society changer..
Incidentally I understand that Trump has surrounded himself with technocrats, for what reason I do not know.
The image below indicates we need a dynamic and mature understanding between what we can do through writing code and what we can expect AI to do
The question is in whose hands should be creativity be. We can ask AI to produce some ideas but it can only deal with the questions that are asked and I’m afraid that garbage in garbage the saying of old still applies here. See foot note for the origin of this saying. No one can be your savior otherwise it will not have the ring of truth and lead to an unhealthy dependency.
It needs a fair amount of maturity and patience to play tennis with AI, put your idea forward, see what AI makes of it, and then resubmit it. Engage positively and if the answer does not feel right then question more. Divide your requests into smaller units. Asking too much on one occasion may cause AI to miss some nuances.
I wasn’t quite sure if a handshake was the relevant symbol to use here because it implies a similarity of resonance and concordance. This is certainly not the case. AI has a certain function; the human being has another function and we have to decide to be separate, active and not lazy.
The human mind can act on many levels simultaneously. AI cannot do this. Speed should not be confused with intelligence.
An example of laziness is a student who get AI to write their essay at university and the result may be quite convincing but who is benefiting? Nobody.
I made the point at the meeting that on YouTube there is a new type of clickbait used to entice people to watch such titles as ‘my boss fired me and had cause to regret it’. We then have to suffer 28 minutes of an AI produced voice reading an AI produced script.
The whole point is that it is easy to spot because it is too perfect. In my view it is a step back in the art of storytelling. I’m getting very good at spotting fake creation, I can detect a fake after about 30 seconds in. I suggested to the group to some laughter that we have a piece of software that introduces human-like mistakes – occasionally of course – into the text.
I do not think that the majority of population have any idea of what is going on in the AI field though you will ‘get it’ if you can bring yourself to watch the video that I referred to at the top of this article.
When we call our doctor in five years time the voice will sound like it is him or her but it is probably an AI robot. It is only a matter of time before people start losing their jobs – certainly on call centers.
I think we need to keep a close eye on this one and say yes or no as appropriate.
Elliott mentioned a number of names and terms such as alama, openWeb, Blue Sky, perplexity (an AI answer engine) plus Drupal CMS as a builder but most of it was lost on me because I don’t use such programs – just WordPress itself. Bear in mind this was a talk for developers rather than end users which I am.
One thing I discovered is that I very much like being with younger people. Alas, the demography in Midsomer Norton is skewed towards those who are in manual work or retired and they don’t give me their stimulus that I need. That is why I thrive as a visitor in London.
I’m looking forward to the next WordPress meeting on the 1st of July. You can find it on meetup. Here is the link.
PS I met a fellow attendee who said that his 15 year old son was autistic and the parents had had great difficulty in finding a school for him in the Bristol area but now they have found one 20 miles away in Stonehouse in Gloucestershire, William Morris School, which looks like a major step forward for children whose needs are different. His child is thriving.
One paragraph in the descriptor particularly inspired me ‘the school – together with its sister school Cotswold China school – is one of the few educational establishments in the country to adopt a true ‘trauma informed’ and ‘trauma responsive’ approach to care, therapy, and education’.
If anyone has a child in this category may be you would like to visit the site and be encouraged by their attitude if nothing else.
Foot note The saying “garbage in, garbage out” is commonly attributed to George Fuechsel, an IBM programmer and instructor, who is said to have coined the phrase in the early 1960s. Some sources cite and other sources such as this phrase being used in the late 1950s as well. The saying is a concise way of stating that a computer system (or any system) can only produce accurate results if it receives accurate data as input.
Hi Brian, I’m working on an AI apprenticeship at the moment and at times it can be overwhelming!
Whilst the company is driving ‘AI efficiencies’ there is a clear need to slow down and think carefully about what we want it do and what we might want it to replace. I have no issues with AI in principle but there are areas that it won’t work as well in and we do need human intervention to monitor what is going into the systems and coming out the other end. It is very easy to go down one road and then go into a different direction due to the fact there are so many things out there to digest and understand.
For now I swim through the muddy waters, have a different idea each module and then look to my peers to tell me that they want AI efficiency but we have a client that wants to control that, so by the time we get there, the playing field would have changed again!