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The cognitive load of conversational agents is a feature not a bug

Interesting quote from the US DoD’s chief AI officer in this FT piece:

For some users, this inbuilt unreliability is a deal-breaker. Craig Martell, the US Department of Defense’s chief AI officer, said last week he would demand a “five 9s” [99.999 per cent] level of accuracy before deploying an AI system. “I cannot have a hallucination that says ‘Oh yeah, put widget A connected to widget B’ — and it blows up,” he said. Many generative AI systems placed too high a “cognitive load” on the user to determine what was right or wrong, he added.

While I understand he’s talking narrowly about hallucination here, I’d suggest this ‘cognitive load’ should be seen as a feature not a bug. Conversational agents reward complexity which requires a reflective engagement with them; the fact it can go wrong without this engagement isn’t a problem with the agent, it’s a problem with the user.

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