My Horrible Interaction With AI

Forgive me, I beg, the odd, breezy posting schedule this week. I reasoned that many would still be on vacation and wanted to save the (for a word) denser material for next week. Like the article on deriving objective morality: not simple, not short, not easy.

So I took this week to finish what I could of the second edition of a book that did surprisingly well (at least I thought so; it sold about 5,000 copies). Working title: Son of Everything You Believe Is Wrong. I got to the point I wanted an index, and since I wrote in LaTeX, I thought this would be particularly simple using AI.

I was wrong.

I should have expected it, since it was I who wrote about AI limitations: here and here (among others). These language models excel where they have all the causes, like in images and moving images (movies). They do okay, but err often enough, with code or math. As long as the code or math is common, it works fine. But once you move into new areas, well, you had better know the right answers, or you could fool yourself easily.

My book, I told both Grok and ChatGPT, was a book on logical arguments. It therefore assumed it would be like all those other books, which it is not. You can follow the hilarity in the video below.

Briefly, since I already blew two days on this and want to purge the bad taste, this:

I asked Grok for index tags, which in LaTeX are simple: “\index{word}” next to the words. It kept swearing, and promising larger and larger numbers, of index tags were being inserted into my text. Best I could get was two tags. Mostly none. Worst was my own idiocy for not checking and continuing on as if it was working.

Because I had to keep uploading chapters, I eventually ran out of my weekly credits. I had heard ChatGPT does better with language, so I created an account there (I never had one) and asked the model if it could do LaTeX index tags. It could!

I uploaded the whole book, as requested, and what followed was the best comedy. Over and over and over ChatGPT said something along the lines of “This is good. Here is our plan. We’ll first create a Table of Concepts. We’ll then review the entries and I’ll do the tags.”

I kept answering “Great, let’s do it.” Then it said, in effect, “Agreed. Here is our plan. We’ll first create a …”

Over and over again. Then it turned out it said it couldn’t read the book it was quoting back to me. It told me to re-load chapters each time I asked a question, because of some internal limitation. I did so.

Promises by the acre were provided. But not one damned index tag did I get.

Then I ran out of the daily credits or whatever they use to track usage.

My own fault, all of it. I spent all yesterday afternoon doing the tagging by hand. Which I should have done in the first place.

Anyway, to tease the book, I created that seven second video with Grok. And since it knows the causes of images, it did a reasonable job. I thought it was cute. So I posted it on YouTube (and here yesterday).

I immediately lost a lot of followers especially on YouTube, doubtless on the suspicion that I had turned into yet another slop AI account.

I have learned my lesson. I promise.

Video

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