2024 Weeknote 36 : Here at the end of summer, AI can’t see AI

September 2 – 8

My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work.

[1] Your ever-so-slightly-different writing style probably looks like you faked it with an AI tool (when scanned with AI tools)

We’re clearly on the back side of the AI hype cycle, rapidly sliding down that heady peak in the chart into a trough of despair (for a bit, anyway). That’s good. Because I just learned about another problem: AI tools cannot accurately detect AI-generated writing. (Which is funny, because I can.)

I was tipped off by this Bluesky exchange:

Thank God I’m not in college anymore. I’d get flagged as AI all day long. Meanwhile, Dr. Williams also posted this exchange, explaining the problem a bit more:

Bottom Line: AI tools have zero intelligence. They just have math. The LLM-based tools are good at statistically estimating which words likely come next in a sentence from macro- and meso-language indicators based on an ingestion of a huge corpus of text. But the source text matters tremendously, both for producing new statistically-likely passages and for detecting passages that may be statistically-generated by other LLMs.

And may the AI gods help you if you’re creating content for U.S. and English-speaking European consumers but you aren’t originally from this part of the world, as noted in this WIRED piece: “AI models were mostly trained on data from and for Western markets, and therefore can’t really recognize anything that falls outside of those parameters.”

I remain hopeful that there will be tightly-targeted uses for generative AI in a few areas. But I’m glad to see NVIDIA’s stock start to fall back to Earth and articles like these start to get recognition. The breathless “age of AI” will really just be some nice innovations around the edges, not a total re-think of technology.

*NVIDIA’s stock has been up over 2,200% in the last 5 years, with most of that coming in the last year due to expectations around their hardware-level participation in the generative AI market.*

[2] Miscellanea

I was surprised to see the likes of Bloomberg take on the biggest player in local government software this week, in a piece titled: How Local Governments Got Hooked on One Company’s Janky Software. Bloomberg released this blockbuster report on September 5, pointing to lots of Tyler Technologies problems, like a checkered history of failed deployments, technical screw-ups (some of which put thousands of people in jail without justification), and lots of related lawsuits. I had no idea local government software woes could get national attention.
- I have a lot of thoughts about this Bloomberg piece because Franklin County just killed a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract with Tyler this summer.
- I’m debating whether to share those thoughts publicly. But don’t get too excited—my comments are about software strategy, not the specifics of our experience with Tyler.
As noted previously, we are hiring an Application Developer for our GX Development team. And in less than one week we completed 17 screening calls—a record. I was in some of the calls, but it was Eric Nutt that hit this high-water mark. Really remarkable achievement. We’re moving fast due to the weird process we use for hiring. We need a finalist by 9/27 or we can’t hire until December.
Listened to a great podcast episode this week—Coaching for Leaders: The Habits That Hold Leaders Back, with Marshall Goldsmith. Goldsmith is the guy that wrote the bestseller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful and he has plenty of good advice.
Due to an unattended package found outside the courts building on Thursday morning (which was perceived as a potential threat) most employees were remote on Thursday, so we held our 5th Hack Your Bureaucracy book club via Teams and it was okay. Got to use the Breakout Rooms feature for the first time. Still prefer in-person, though.
Joined the Digital Service Network‘s Chief Digital Service Officer call on Thursday afternoon and learned the State of Maryland is running into the same problems we are with website consolidation, rationalization, and long-term ownership. It’s good to know we’re not alone, and neither are they! Government across the country are dealing with this past proliferation and trying to bring it back together to build better services for residents.
And Thursday night I made a final trip to see the Columbus Clippers with some colleagues from the office. Summer is truly at an end.
Quickbase posted videos from their national Empower24 conference to YouTube this week, including the presentation that included yours truly, Eric Nutt, and Luke McCormac talking about our Unclaimed Funds software project. You can see it below:

[3] Watch This

I hope Paramount keeps this on YouTube! Starring Archer’s H. Jon Benjamin it’s an exploration of what happens when Starfleet doesn’t do a great job hiring scientists. Anyone who’s been in a staff management role will cringe, and laugh, at this scenario. Stay tuned to the end for the hilarious Tribbles cereal commercial.