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AI impacts us all

You might be old-fashioned and decide that you will not be using AI.

Sadly, that won't protect you from the effects of AI and those effects may be far from positive.

A great example of this just popped onto the new wires and happened just across the ditch in Australia.

This incident also shows what a sorry bunch of souls our big-name accounting firms are.

We've all read the stories about how the big accounting firms have been involved in fraud over quite a long period of time so this latest revelation should come as no surprise.

However, this time they decided to use AI to streamline the process.

As documented in a story on ArsTechnica, huge international accounting firm Deloitte will refund the Aussie government after filing a report that was filled with AI-generated hallucinations.

Wow, imagine that, you pay top dollar to an international accounting firm to produce a report and end up with AI-slop.

How much per hour does Deloitte charge for their services?

Well according to this site that figure could be anywhere from US$250 to US$1,000 per hour.

How much does it cost for the office junior to feed a bunch of prompts into ChatGPT?

If they'd even bothered to verify the results that ChatGPT had spewed out that would be something but clearly they didn't -- so we're possibly looking at a markup of as much as US$970 per hour here, that's 4,500 percent on the $30 per hour an auditor gets paid in Australia.

With this kind of nonsense likely to become the norm, I think it's time that all companies were required to clearly disclose when AI was used as part of the workflows they're charging for.

I suspect that companies like Deloitte would push back strongly against such a requirement because it would devalue their services. Many would soon realise that if they're simply relying on AI and not even checking the results of that AI's output then it would be cheaper to bypass the middle-man and use ChatGPT to do the work directly.

As I said, you don't have to be a direct user of AI yourself to suffer the impact of AI's weaknesses, flaws and foibles.

I remain very concerned that so many businesses and government departments seem hell-bent on cutting costs by rushing headlong into a dependence on a techology which remains so over-hyped and vulnerable to massive failure which often goes unrecognised.

Carpe Diem folks!

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