The AI oracle

This happened a couple of years or so ago.

"These numbers are wrong," the manager wrote in the public company Slack channel, tagging me about an entire multiple-tab dashboard containing several reports that I had created.

Thirty minutes or so later, while trying to understand what it was that either them or me did wrong, they finally revealed it: they had fed the entire dashboard to ChatGPT and, alas, the bot's response was that all the numbers were incorrect.

It turns out that the manager did not know about the relevant and necessary criteria to produce it. They didn't bother to ask. They didn't even bother to read the - really short - documentation on it!

So I pointed them out to that information. And there they went, back to the oracle, repeating the question — now with the relevant information attached — and their god confirmed: the data was correct, after all.

"Oh I see," they said.

"But you don't," I thought.