To really foul things up
On fat crayons, Van Halen, and why humans have to be in the decision-making loop even as AI gets pretty impressive at its work
Someone on an independent gubernatorial campaign in Nebraska picked a campaign logo with the shape of the state all wrong. It’s immediately evident how wrong the shape is -- plainly, grindingly wrong.
■ The mistake, like many today, is almost certainly a case of the sloppy use of AI. A child could have drawn a better outline with a fat crayon and tracing paper over a paper map (or, with only a bit more talent, by creating a vector graphic layered over a raster image file of a state map from the public domain).
■ Van Halen notoriously kept an odd provision in their concert rider: That M&M’s should be furnished for backstage snacking, but under no circumstances should any brown ones appear. It wasn’t because they had anything against the brown M&M’s (which taste just like the others, after all). The “brown M&M’s test“ was their way of quickly detecting who had read the paperwork thoroughly and who had not. It really is an elegant test.
■ The same principle applies here: Look for situations where people fail to check obvious details. That’s generally a warning sign that something much larger has been overlooked, as well. (And getting the outline of a state utterly wrong but sticking it in a campaign logo anyway? That’s an obvious detail.)
■ An old adage says, “To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer.” We’re in a whole new phase of that same old truth: Humans need to be in the decision-making loop for just about anything that matters, because unchecked computer errors can really, really foul things up. But extra woe unto those humans who either don’t have the sense to recognize giant errors or don’t have the discipline to check the work.