Thanks to the humans

Transcript

Well, I’m just going to talk, because I’m sitting in the car waiting to move, and we’re not going anywhere fast in a traffic jam. And hello, this is John-Paul, and this is Voice Notes to the World.

And I’ve just had the most extremely pleasant experience in the last couple of days, being able to send a new newsletter to, well, my readers obviously, and have a link inside it to ask them to complete a survey. And the ones who clicked went straight to my website. They didn’t have to go through some third-party survey thing like Google Forms, which I’ve used in the past, really quite reluctantly, and therefore not really used very much. But I do love having the to and fro of a kind of response, like a survey.

So it’s been brilliant to have spent a few hours over this last few days building a survey function on my website, which is something I simply would not have imagined possible before, because I’m not a great coding expert. It’s taken me a number of years having my website to work out how to do fairly basic things.

But now here’s the complicated thing. I don’t know quite how to – let me just keep talking. The complicated thing, the complicated thing is, I do kind of wish AI hadn’t been invented. But I’m also really interested and curious about how things work, so now that it’s here, I wanted to try and work out how it might be useful to me.

And I don’t want it to be me, but I do want it to do the things that I can’t do. And anything that’s kind of essentially something that could be looked up and executed by a robot is perfect.

And one of the things that a kind of robot can do, and look up very easily, is how to use my website to create a survey. So that’s what I asked it to do. I didn’t try and give it lots of complicated instructions. I said I want to have a survey, so I can abandon Google’s Google Forms and do it myself on my website.

And so then I watched as the AI went through all sorts of procedures to find how that might be doable on the particular kind of website that I have. And it found bits of code, and it found bits of this, and found bits of that, and then it installed it. And then I ran the survey, and I did a couple of test replies myself, and it amused me to get my own answers. But these were all still only within the website, and it wasn’t successfully sending me the results, which was slightly annoying.

So I told the AI what was going wrong, and then it went off again looking things up online. And it found that this was a problem that had arisen for someone else in August, and it found the name of the person who had logged this problem, and then it found the name of the person who fixed the problem.

So the reason why I mention those two individual names is because, yes, I got help from an AI, but the help that I got was based on something that a human being had done, and the AI basically just found those people.

So having then made a few changes to my website so that it all worked perfectly – and this is no small thing – I’m able to have a survey that emails me correctly every time someone submits the form. But I don’t necessarily know anything about them. I don’t know their name if they don’t leave it. I don’t know their address. I can’t sort of track them down or do anything dodgy. They just write what they like in answer to my survey, and I get an email to me, from me, from my website, saying what their response was.

Now, of course, I like it even more if they do leave their name and their email address, because then I can respond, and I like to know who I’m talking to. But it’s a good thing to have the capacity to leave a note anonymously. I think that’s a good thing.

So anyway, I’ve got that. But I did say to the AI, I want you to keep a record, everywhere you go, of all the human beings who have contributed to the solution. And so I did that, and it gave me the names of several people who belong to, and are quite prominent in, the very small network of people who know about my type of website, which is called Textpattern.

And so I asked it to collect a note of all those names. Most of them were not names that mean anything to me, but in fact three of them were people who mean something to me. And so I really wanted to leave a note of how excited I am that I can now do this thing, and also some thanks to the individuals who made it possible, without pretending that this was all done by humans, because I couldn’t have done it without the AI.

So I’m just trying to be really honest about that. I did use an AI to make this work, but it was reporting back to me at every stage on things that human beings had achieved and made possible.

Yes, technology – my website surveys – allows me to be in touch with human beings, and get really, sometimes, funny and touching replies from them in answer to my survey questions. How cool is that? I think it’s very cool.

I would say that this has been me talking off the top of my head into my phone’s Voice Memos app, which I will then transcribe and upload to my website, and I’m very, very happy about all of this. I hope you can hear that in my voice.

Thank you for listening. This has been an episode of Voice Notes to the World, by me, John-Paul Flintoff.

Thank you to Stef Dawson, Pete Cooper and Julian R.

jp at this domain name.