by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course it makes sense, it’s only words.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s begin this post with a story. I worked for the Federal government for a few years. Each employee had an annual Performance Appraisal Report or PAR. The supervisor would summarize how a person performed during the past year. The PAR was an important document that played a role in how the person would advance in their career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors had to write the PARs. Most supervisors hated writing the PARs. Most supervisors couldn’t write well. Angst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Enter an old friend of mine. He had worked 30 years. He had kept copies of all the PARs written by his supervisors about him. He supervised several people. He had to write several PARs a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No problem. He would open his file cabinet draw, randomly grab an old PAR, randomly put his finger on a paragraph in the random PAR, and copy it word for word. Put the random PAR back in the file cabinet. Repeat this five times. Five paragraphs. The PAR is done. Just randomly copied paragraphs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My old friend was often complimented on how well he wrote PARs. It was only words. It worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Enter the era of AI and Large Language Models and all this wonderful new stuff. Same thing. It’s only words. We have a context. We have preconceived notions of what we should be reading and what the text should say. We read into it what we want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wow! That AI system is a genius.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wow! My old friend who randomly picked paragraphs out of randomly picked PARs was a genius.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s only words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, this post is silly. There is much more to it than random paragraphs and all that. Perhaps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips Of course it makes sense, it’s only words. Let’s begin this post with a story. I worked for the Federal government for a few years. Each employee had an annual Performance Appraisal Report or PAR. The supervisor would summarize how a person performed during the past year. The PAR was an important […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[297,469,32,50,416,67,5],"tags":[322,470,154,172,417,187,128],"class_list":["post-4730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability","category-artificial-intelligence","category-communication","category-thinking","category-vocabulary","category-work","category-writing","tag-accountability","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-communication","tag-thinking","tag-vocabulary","tag-work","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4730"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4731,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4730\/revisions\/4731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}