Agreed. Most corporations (including the one I work for) have policies that only people specifically authorized to speak with the press can participate in interviews like these.
The only way a reporter is going to get “realfacts” and not “goodfacts” is if he can interview someone not in a PR position. We sometimes see reporters able to pull this off, generating impressive exposés (even if their legitimacy may be highly suspect), but I think it’s fair to say that at a company like Apple, someone even giving the appearance of giving such an interview is going to be summarily fired.
So I would assume that you’re only going to get these kinds of interviews from disgruntled employees who were planning on quitting anyway - which is hardly going to be an unbiased opinion, even if it is the opposite of the official (and therefore also biased) opinions.
That’s been my experience. ChatGPT has been very good at “suggesting” approaches I had not considered, and I have found that helpful on many occasions. However, the actual code it presents often doesn’t even compile, and when it does, I don’t recall it ever actually solving the problem presented as a prompt.
Speaking as a veteran reporter, back in the 1980s and 1990s it was sometimes possible for a reporter to get through to corporate executives who would talk openly and honestly. Now it’s very difficult unless you know them, they trust you, and you can get around the public relations department. These days the only time I can get through to most corporate officials at all is if I am responding to a press release they sent out.
I suspect this stonewalling contributes to the number of dubious corporate projects get off the ground.
Last week I installed the ChatGPT app for Mac (I stumbled onto it - didn’t know it existed).
I’ve been writing an accounts solution in Filemaker and was struggling with a particular calculation. I asked ChatGPT for help and it threw back perfectly functioning FMP code which did exactly what I needed. I would have eventually worked it out but the time (and frustration) saving will be a massive benefit to productivity. I tried a few other things for fun and it was surprisingly good.
If this is the sort of integration we can expect in the OS then I’m all for it - count me impressed.
It’s worth reminding ourselves again that these tools will be training us almost as much as we are training them – recall that autocorrect has made us say we are sick when we might want to say we feel ill, because ‘ill’ gets turned into ’ I’ll ’ and eventually we learn not to use ‘ill’ when we don’t mean I’ll.
Just so, the mention in the piece that a Focus might include settings where only urgent notifications or messages show up means that everyone is going to learn to use the right words to get categorized/tagged as urgent – the use of those words or phrases will rise, and become more standardized.
I’m sure there are a lot more examples of how we will fit ourselves into these new boxes.
