Is that kind of like the FBI?
“We investigated ourselves and determined we did nothing wrong.”
Azure, lake house, fabric… soft nice pleasant terms. These names really crack me up. I guess it’s to help programmers fantasize or something. 
I think the Grow demos at Insights are one of the most promising future use cases for AI - having the business be able to ask questions of the data directly, like what was the profit for such and such product or category over such and such time period, would be a tremendous benefit. But I am skeptical the answers will ever be true. In every company I have ever worked for, there is no clear cut way to answer these questions - there are always tons of business rules about if this, except when, and on the 5th Tuesday, that must get built in to various queries to get the real answer. How would AI know any of that? Will we someday be able to train AI with all of these quirks and rules? And how can you validate the result that is being presented when you don’t have access to the raw business logic behind it? (or maybe you do have access?).
In its current state, I find chatgpt extremely useful for general time savings like John described - it will read huge long error logs for me and answer questions about them. It can parse xml and find specific values or parameters for me quickly. It will read my MRP logs for me. It will explain errors in my event viewer (although last week, it told me to google the error number lol). It will stub out code for me, It will convert tsql to linq. Tons and tons of time savings for things I have to deal with every day. But as far as hooking it up directly to the ERP - I feel that is still a ways away.
I read somewhere that there is now a marked decrease in traffic on stackoverflow because people are asking their questions to chatgpt instead of eachother. On one hand, its great to eliminate some of the common questions that people seem to ask over and over again. On the other hand, I hope this community (and other tech forums) survive the chatgpt era and we don’t stop collaborating just because chatgpt answers faster!
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I think once it responds with GIFs we’re in trouble. 
The difference is that ChatGPT doesn’t know when it’s wrong and talks out their butt all the time and…. Oh wait… we are screwed
How is this any different than you? Are you a robot too!?
And what did ChatGPT use to train on? StackOverflow to some extent. What happens when the training data keeps looking at itself? It might provide some insights occasionally but if the information sources dry up, how good will the models get?
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Us. All of us. They scraped our posts, meant to help our peers as a contribution to the community, and are trying to turn it into their property for their profit. It’s a land grab for our own ideas. The artists out there, to their credit, grasped this immediately the second imagine generators started popping up. It’s going to take a bit for everyone to realize this is inherent to all generative AI.
And industry is intentionally trying to sleight of hand this by writing vague open letters about how this stuff will lead to Skynet and Terminators murdering the children. It’s like the plot of a dystopian cyberpunk novel.
The one saving grace is that these programs do not appear to be that hard to fork and iterate. And the most unscrupulous outfits may not be able to commercialize models built on unlicensed training data, since that data is (on some level) embedded within the model and it’s a statistical probability that it will spit out infringing content.
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one solution to this might be to use an old trick that has been used for decades… it is called “Salting” the data with known false data that can be traced.
- in the mailing list business, we salted our list with a few random names/addresses that were delivered back to us. These addresses were always sent out with our mailing list “rentals”, and they were coded so that we knew the source of the rental. if we saw the address used more than once, we knew someone had broken their agreement to only use our list one time (or they gave/sold it to someone else).
- in the MAP drawing business, there are “Phantom settlements” or cities that are inserted onto a map. If that city appears on someone else’s map, then the original creator of the map knows that someone else stole their copyrighted data (see Phantom settlement - Wikipedia).
Perhaps in the same way, we can insert known salted content that would show up when ChatGPT gives an answer giving us a trace back to the source.
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A few weeks ago I had it write me a poem about how great Epicor is:
In the world of business, speed is key,
And Epicor ERP is as fast as can be.
From inventory to sales and beyond,
It streamlines processes with a single bond.
Its features are vast, its functions robust,
No task too daunting, no hurdle too tough.
With real-time data at your fingertips,
Decision-making is swift, no time for slips.
Manufacturing flows like a well-oiled machine,
From planning to delivery, every step clean.
Supply chain management is second to none,
With Epicor ERP, everything is done.
Time is money, and Epicor ERP knows,
How to make the most of it, as it goes.
It boosts productivity like never before,
Efficiency and speed, always at the core.
So if you seek a system that won’t let you down,
Epicor ERP is the best around.
With its speed and productivity, you’ll surely see,
A world of success, just wait and see.
Well, the AI’s are already sh*tting in their own food dish whenever someone posts GPT outputs and then they scrape the posts for data to train the next model.
Clearly, the answer is to weaponize that with a bot that deliberately and incessantly posts absolute nonsense everywhere about everything until the bots consider the sky being green a good response.
/s
I have used it to translate a resignation letter in the style of Doctor Seuss. I also tried Stephen King, but it was 3x as long…
My wife does this with subscription services. She adds the name of the service as her middle name (“Jane Netflix Smith”). Now when she gets emails (even snail mail!) from random spam vendors addressed to “Jane Hulu” or “Jane Netflix” she knows exactly who is selling her data.
My next salary negotiation email, as written by Tywin Lannister.
This is a great tip. I do something similar - in Gmail, you can add a + and any text after the base email address and it will be delivered. For example, if your email is imauser@gmail.com, you can enter imauser+hulu@gmail.com to track if Hulu sells your information (they do) after you sign up.
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There are, “lies, damned lies, and statistics” - Benjamin Disraeli.
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