LLM “AIs” are for stuff nobody wants

A recent experience at work led me to conclude that the AI revolution will pass most of us by. In mid-December, I fell ill with COVID. I’d updated my status in Microsoft Teams accordingly.

About six weeks later, a co-worker wrote to me, asking whether the status still applied? He hoped not?

I’d forgotten about it, but nothing had reminded me. It’s interesting that I get five mails a week about MS Viva and about Sharepoint Stuff I Might Have Missed, but I don’t get a single hint that my status might be out of date after six weeks.

So much for the AI revolution. This incident helped me refine my opinion on it. It’s definitely coming. but it will not be useful to me. If it is, it will only be incidentally or accidentally beneficial to me.

The prime use of AI will be of benefit to others, probably scammers or data scrapers.

You can set a custom time for the status-update options. But how am I supposed to know in advance how long I want to set it for? Sometimes you just don’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice if it would ask you after a day or two? It might sound annoying, but not if you include an option to “never ask me again for this status.” You could also just have an “ask me again when it seems stale” option or “how long do you think it should be set like this?” or “when would you like me to ask you about your status again?”

It wouldn’t even take AI to have a trigger that asks again after a week, unless you’ve told it otherwise. The likelihood that a status applies for that long is pretty low.

No, instead, Microsoft is measuring how long I spend in planned meetings and telling me how much “quiet time” I’ve had in the last month rather than helping me not look like an idiot who’s had COVID for two straight months.