Raw LLM Responses

So, I kind of want to throw the tech bros - or at least their advertising staff - a bone on the llama commercial. Because I remember when, back in the dark ages, I watched a commercial where a woman holding up her flip phone said "I'll text you later" to the cool guy and then tripped on the edge of the sidewalk, coming off adorkable where she wanted to be cool. And you know what I yelled at the screen? "TEXT IS NOT A VERB!" Because at the time it wasn't. This has been made so ubiquitous by public acceptance of this concept that the ad is almost hard to parse now - To watch it now would be like seeing an ad telling you to drink water when thirsty. And likewise my response comes off as nonsensical, because now "Text" very much IS a verb. Just like "access" used to only be a thing you had, not something you did (credit to Calvin & Hobbes for that nugget). The point is that this kind of thing - even if the individual attempt is dumb - is kind of an entrenched part of the tech life cycle. The techbros invent something to revolutionize the world, it makes sense that people don't automatically accept its use because it hasn't been part of life up to now and people have been (for some value of it) "fine" without it, and then they make their pitch to turn that thing into a necessary part of life. And for Gemini I've seen a better pitch in a different ad! A woman says, "Find me an italian restaurant close to Dan's workplace downtown that allows pets" and it does. That...seems reasonably useful! I think contextual voice controls for computers are a place where corners of the AI "revolution" could really shine. I'd LOVE to be able to tell my phone, "If I don't have anything set for 9pm on Sunday put in a 45-minute event called 'workout' for that time." To have it recognize from context that I mean to look in my calendar. To have it know to do nothing if I've already got an event there. To have it make an event and label it based on my voice command. To be smart enough to prompt ME with a follow-up question - To show me what it did [Workout] and say, "Like this? Would you like it to repeat on later weeks as well if the slot is empty?" But that's not a revolution. It's a tiny improvement, unworthy of the massive investment it's been given. So the actual good will likely be discarded by the people who should be pushing it.