Now listen up, it’s not all bad.
I know Apple has poo-pooed the idea that AI has any intelligence with its wide-ranging publication looking into reasoning capability.
And I know that my own experiences continue to get increasingly weird, with much lies and gaslighting from my good friends Chat, Claude and Gemima.
But what did we expect when most of the hype about AI is from AI companies that want us to buy their AI?
Throughout history, we’ve been guilty of flying before we can glide, so I don’t think our giddy excitedness about AI was any different.
But instead of laughing at what it can’t do, why not maintain excitement for what it can, how it compares to our own navigation of the world, and what we might be in the early stage of experiencing.
As Eddison said in the lead up to his lightbulb moment, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
So what can AI do other than my LLM experiences of a giddy 16 year-old assistant who overpromises?
Well, if we strip back the hyperbole, in recruitment, it can automate better.
One area I’ll be looking at is how to automate the research involved in market mapping.
I know others find great gains in auto-transcription, particularly where that data can be accessed consistently across an organisation.
I won’t for a few reasons, one of which is I prefer confidential trust over asking permission to record a private conversation; another is that what is said isn’t often what is meant; a third is that recruitment for me is as much about the bits in-between as what we think we measure.
I’d say the same for automating workflows - interview arrangements, contract management and so on - if you see those as an opportunity to build relationships, it’s perhaps less enticing than if you’d rather be doing other activities.
You can automate advert writing quite effectively. If by effective you mean churning out the same, quicker, compared to a time-strapped recruiter who doesn’t value copywriting.
You can automate everything, in the same way everyone else can, meaning we all have access to the same democratised tools in our assertion that ‘we are different’.
And that’s the promise of AI as it stands right now - the opportunity to shave off the edges that make us unique, leaving only thousands of spinning plates.
As for what it might do, that’s what maintains my profound optimism for AI.
After all, at some point the light bulb did light, and stay lit, the plane did take off under its own power, and that nuclear bomb did change the world irrevocably.
This is the last of my series on AI for now.
I came to no conclusion, as there’s no conclusion to be had.
And while I went in hoping to come out as an AI powered recruiter, filled with drive and purpose from technological improvements, mainly I now just want to be more human.
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Greg