Age of Slop

Our internet provider proudly announced their new ai chatbot. The link to unsubscribe was broken so I asked the bot how to unsubscribe. The answer had little resemblance to the Swedish UI but at least it gave me the idea to log in and look around until I found the setting I needed. 

We live the in the Age of Slop. Computers used to be very good at calculating. Coming up with correct answers by repeating tedious calculations ad nauseam. Now we get stochastic word salad. 

95% of ai projects fail. This was a headline last month that almost sent the ai shares over the edge. 

Maybe you read the headline and was happy to be confirmed that ai doesn’t work. Clickbait schadenfreude. I read the underlying report. That was not at all what it said. 

The report investigates what the 5% does right. It’s a good read. It’s about doing good project management. Solve the right problem with the right tool and use it right. Change initiatives are hard. You need to understand the business. You need to work with the business. Have them want it and have them own the solution. 

Users resist change. Once we have found a way to accomplish a task, we are very reluctant to explore other ways to solve the same problem. 

That’s how we learn to use technology. We muddle through until we come up with something that works. Local optimisation. 

In the study, many projects reported problems with user adaptation. What was interesting is that 70% of the users reported using ChatGPT daily. Only 40% got a subscription from their employer. When a company rolled out a custom built ai tool, users compared it to what they were used to and found it lacking. Give a skilled work a crap tool and see how quick they will throw it away and get on with their task.

I’m sure my internet provider think of the project as a success. They could reduce the headcount in customer support. 

What they really needed to do was to fix the broken link in the email so that there was no need to contact customer support in the first place.