• laranis@lemmy.zip
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    12 hours ago

    We had a presentation at work that the VPs were so proud of and proclaimed to be the future of business with AI. Ready? Are you sure? The pure vision involved is staggering, and I want you to be prepared for it. Ok, here goes:

    Here’s the scenario… A buyer gets an email from another employee to buy something for the business. The buyer opens an AI bot and tells it to search their email for purchase requests. The AI identifies which emails are likely purchase requests. The buyer then asks the AI to see the first one. It is a purchase request! Hooray! The AI sees that the amount is over a certain dollar amount. It asks, “Do you want to forward it to your manager for approval?” “Why, yes, thank you!” It then sends a kindly worded email on their behalf to their manager. Eventually, the manager replies and the next time the buyer opens their AI chatbot it notices the response and interprets the response as an approval. “Would you like to process this purchase request?” “Yes please, almighty chat bot!” The application then copies what it thinks are the relevant data (carefully formatted for the success of the demo, of course) into a web form open in a browser window for the buyer to submit to the purchasing system.

    Mid-six figure executives of this fortune 100 company, some with C__ in their titles, applauded. They shook hands. They beamed and professed the future was here and we were on the forefront of it.

    Not a single Vice President in this “technology company” bothered asking WHY THE FUCK WE WERE MAKING PURCHASE REQUESTS BY FUCKING EMAIL. Like, maybe we should go back to 1999 and master digital workflows first? Or at this point even pay some consultant hacks to implement some of that RPA crack they were peddling a decade before that we dropped $10M on? Or maybe, maybe, take Microsoft’s dick out of our mouths long enough to ask whether ANY of this makes sense!

    The future has arrived. This bubble can’t pop soon enough.

    • CausticFlames@sopuli.xyz
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      6 hours ago

      This was the single funniest thing I’ve read all week. Thank you

      At my place of work I sometimes come across tickets for users in the company asking for access to certain paid AI tools, with excuses like: “Access to chatGPT to more effectively send emails to clients” and

      “Need AI image generation for blog update” even though we have an ENTIRE fucking art department.

      It makes me laugh but it also makes me sad. I mark them as low priority and move on to other shit.

      • laranis@lemmy.zip
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        6 hours ago

        I don’t know how the Onion survives today. You can’t make this shit up, it would be too absurd.