After over fifteen years of marriage, it's only natural that my wife and I would have a few inside jokes that we share. It might be a situation where we simply glance at each other and know what the other is thinking. Sometimes it is a phrase one of us utters to the other one after we hear or see something specific.
For instance, say there is a news story on TV about composting your garden. Like any good reporter, they would try to bring in experts from the field to add some background and insight to their story. Let's say they bring in a "refuse reclamation and renewal engineer". Now, they might actually say the person's title, or just display the title on the bottom of the screen, but it never fails either myself or @mrsbozz will look at the other and say:
Sounds Made Up...
No offense intended, but some of these jobs just sound absolutely ridiculous. Which brings me more to the point of this post. I was sitting in my office the other day going through my work emails when I got an alert about a job opening for one of the largest school districts in the state of Michigan. "Director of AI Strategy and Innovation" was the title of the job and you can just about guess the first thing that popped into my head when I read that.
Believe it or not, the salary range for this job was something like $115,000 to $130,000 per year based on "relevant prior work experience". I'm not sure what relevant prior work experience means for a field that has really only been around in its current form for a couple of years. This brings about a couple of issues though.
Wasteful Spending
The first thing that struck me about this job was how wasteful it all seems. I'm sure @gooddream can attest to the fact that government spending is ridiculous from his time working with them. Being a public school employee, I am usually the first to defend the institution, but when they make up jobs like this, I can see why people get a little bent out of shape about public spending. Do I think the Department of Education should go away like Elon and Trump wanted? No, but do I think there could be some cuts made to trim the fat of jobs like this? Absolutely.
Unfortunately, though, AI is the big buzzword these days and money gets thrown at it no matter what.
Which brings me to the second point of this post:
The Trouble With AI
I'm actually not opposed to school districts having a strategy for how they handle and implement AI. I think it's smart, but I don't necessarily think they need a separate position to oversee it. Most public school districts should have a technology committee made up of stakeholders in the district and I feel that committee is the best chance for establishing policy and expectations. In addition to that, just like AI pulls from many other sources, other places have already established thoughtful well written policy on AI, so why reinvent the wheel. Why not just use that and tweak it for your specific needs. I mean, that's what AI basically does right now anyway right?
Just about two weeks ago I actually wrote another post about AI and there was some really good, but shocking conversations in the comments regarding AI. I think the one that struck me most was basically someone saying they regularly run the text of their own posts (that they have written themselves) through an AI checker so that no one can accuse them of using AI to write their posts.
Go back and read that last part again to make sure you understood it correctly. Sounds made up right? I don't know the person, but I honestly believe them when they said that. As I wrote in that post, if you follow the established formula for your writing (opening paragraph, body, conclusion), there is a good chance your content might get mistaken for AI.
Effectively someone might think it "sounds made up".
Pretty crazy right?
I think we are past the point where AI is a fad and eventually we move along to something else. I also think we are a long way away from having a bullet proof strategy to deal with and use AI effectively. Even those policies I mentioned above have their drawbacks and loopholes that people will surely take advantage of.
I know this post probably feels like it is a bit all over the place, but it's just a couple things that have been on my list to talk about lately and at least in my mind, they kind of went together, at least in the general theme.
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