Original tweet:
Transcript
Screenshot of a Bluesky quote chain.
The first post, by @DKThomp on Twitter, says: "Fascinating @benthompson vision of the future of the Internet—i.e., ‘The Agentic Web’ Scenario: Before I go to sleep, I tell ChatGPT ‘Plan my 5-year-old’s birthday next Saturday, budget $500. When you’ve made the reservation, email these 20 ppl a printable invitation to attend. Also my wife wants to go to England in mid-July. Find 5 plausible flights for the family and make several distinct itineraries. Finally, pls edit this work memo.’
When I go to sleep, the Al agent negotiates slots with two bowling alleys, buys a cake, emails printable invites, plans the trip, copy-edits, etc."
It is quoted by Drew Harwell on Bluesky: “Wouldn’t do this in a million years”.
This quote is then quoted by @cinemashoebox.bsky.social: “Waking up to 20 angry parents of my son’s friends wondering why they’ve been sent an invitation to a BRITOTHDYA PRRRYT featuring a picture of Elsa with three eyes and tits bigger than her head. meanhile my wife is boarding a plane for her 176 hour flight to England via four layovers in Antarctica”
Critics who say that LLMs would perform poorly at real life tasks like war, surgery or mailing birthday invitations are suggesting that these are common use-cases.
How slow are they making ChatGPT for this to be an overnight task?
Guess who’s getting tungsten cubes for his birthday!
Fuck yea I love metallic cubes!
This makes me wonder, what about promt injection. I’m not aware of a reliable way to protect against prompt injection.
BRITOTHDYA PRRRYT
Is it really that hard to pull up a couple of websites to search for flights? What is this negotiating he’s talking about anyway? Since when has haggling been part of buying plane tickets?
This magic A.I. also has a list of 20 kids to invite to a birthday party, you still had to spend the time teaching the bot who you wanted to email.
Tbf booking sites are mostly pretty bad in my experience, and haggling has been there since…Priceline? Heavy JS, poor sorting, different prices, hard to define what you’re looking for. It could be worse, but it’s not great.
Is it really haggling or more just sorting through prices offered by different sites and airlines? You can’t really negotiate a lower price, but you can choose layovers, different flights, times to save money.
How is the AI supposed to schedule with venues while you’re sleeping? Aren’t the people who run the venues also sleeping?
Your agent would communicate with the venue’s agent, after some negotiation they would agree on $400 dollars for a 7.5 minute party for 5000 children
after some negotiation they would agree on $400 dollars for a 7.5 minute party for 5000 children
Both AI agents assume that all children are perfectly spherical and the venue exists exclusively with no atmosphere in a vacuum.
That’s a great idea! Treating the children like perfectly spherical objects will let us calculate the flow of children through the bowling alley more like particles through a garden hose. Since we can accommodate many more children this way, let’s expand the invitations to the entire school contacts list, with the new subject line, “Your child-sized balls are cordially invited!” The invitations are sent and your wife’s travel plans have been amended to a one-day round trip starting and ending at the same airport to save on airfare costs. Is there anything else you need help with?
Lol
They recently had the AI village experiment AI plan and carry out an event. They did finally have the event but there were some hiccups like they had to keep reminding the AIs that they were not coporeal and could not do things like drive to pick up the cake or make and bring signs to the event.
Not if they are in a totally different time zone, such as with a country half-way around the world. Or if the venue has an automated system available 24/7… Like a website or app.
I think it’s implied by that bozo that bowling place also runs a chatbot of their own
Even that could have an online system. There’s this big bowling alley, arcade, restaursnt thing that opened a few years ago in my area, and you can schedule use of the lanes via a webpage. No humans needed. It’s not the 90’s anymore.
but that’s not disruptive and works and makes altman zero money
Ah I see what you’re getting at. lol
“176 hour flight to England via 4 layovers in Antarctica” THIS is how you do comedy.
Roundabout way to say “I’m a bad parent”.
I don’t have kids but pretty sure part of being a parent and forming a bond with your child is putting effort into raising them.
ChatGPT will know what they like so you don’t have to.
That’s kind of a childless thing to say lol
I also don’t have any either but I have enough friends and family with young kids to know that it’s unrealistic to do everything well so you have to pick and choose which parts of your kids’ lives are worth the extra effort.
Every parent I know would jump at the opportunity to outsource the tedious crap. Some people love party planning but for most, there is little enjoyment to be found researching and booking a birthday party for a child.
As a parent, I’ll say that while sure, I’d love to outsource “some of the tedious crap”… it’s their birthday. It’s literally the ONE TIME in the year it matters enough that you pay attention to your kid and plan things.
Like, you can phone in so much else, but it’s their fucking birthday. They will remember this crap and never let you forget if you screw it up.
Unless it’d be outsourced to a party planner, I can’t imagine doing this. It’s definitely culture dependent, but part of some core party memories were having seen parents jump through hoops to make the day special. Did they drive to the other end of town to get the special cake you like even though they could have gotten some other cake? Did they remember the specific shade of green you said was your favorite? Did they remember to use your nickname on the cake instead of your full name? I know not all families operate like that, but I had a friend whose mom always decorated their cake. She didn’t like doing it, and it was never good, but her mother always did hers and she wanted to keep the tradition alive. It was always so sweet and funny and looking back definitely some of the best parts of their parties. This is obviously very specific, but if you do throw parties for your kids, I struggle to see how you wouldn’t want to at least make them feel like you put in the effort.
Anyone got a link to the picture of Elsa ?
I tried using an ai image generator, but it couldn’t seem to get it right, so I did it myself on my phone. Also I didn’t know how to make her boobs any bigger, so I just made her head smaller to compensate. Hope you like it!
You should start working as an AI agent, you show promise.
I know I can’t be the only one that, even if AI was up to doing all this reliably, wouldn’t want AI spending my money on it’s own like this, surely? Like, I can be pretty picky and tend to spend a lot of time shopping around for things. A significant fraction of the time I end up deciding not to buy anything because I can’t find exactly what I want at a price I’m willing to spend for it. I think I’d get hella stressed out that my AI would just buy the first thing that fit a category, or the cheapest, or whatever some company paid the AI developer to have it prefer, or such like that, and not to mention the worry that I might suggest buying something as a joke to someone else and have the AI hear and take it seriously or something and then my money’s gone before I realize.
because this isn’t for us. It’s for the ruling class, who have more money than they could ever spend and don’t care about anything.
Are they also going to spend £500 per token then? Not going to make so much from it if you audience of customers is a few thousand people.
I know I can’t be the only one that, even if AI was up to doing all this reliably, wouldn’t want AI spending my money on it’s own like this, surely?
Well, the post you’re replying to has at least two people who agree with you, so I’d say probably not the only one, no
rhetorical question, I do realize im not unique in that but its more to make the point that this idea seems flawed even beyond the tech not being up to it yet.
My friends trust llms to tell them what to buy. Surely that will never ne abused by capitalism. People are stupid.
If you use AI to plan your day, you deserve this.
Yes it would be nice for normal people to afford a secretary or buttler type but ai isn’t there yet it needs more time to cook and stop shoving it into things unneeded
I’m not sure I’d be comfortable having a secretary plan my kids’ party (if I had any). It’s not really appropriate to mix your work and personal life that much.
That’s why I mixed in butler I’m not exactly sure what kind of help/assistant would fill role but if we can’t get more time off more help would be nice
There’s a word for all these people. Lazy. Its just lazy assholes. And greed. Thats why I hate everything about our fake ai age.
Anyone got that picture of Elsa with three eyes and giant knockers?
I’ve got you!
I’m adding that one to my spank bank.
