Tagged: ai

I’ll Never Be An Automatic Transmission Writer

The first time I attempted to drive a stick shift back in the 1970’s, I almost dropped the transmission of my friend’s VW Beetle. He almost cried when the Deutsche Bug made sickening sounds that sounded like, what I imagine, would be the death throes of a wild boar in the teeth of a hungry coyote.

Many years later when I was the CNN Detroit Bureau Chief/correspondent, the fine folks at Mazda lent us a Miata to demo when they first introduced the little two-seater. It, too, was a stick shift and I dutifully attempted to operate it successfully.

I did not. With the top down I proceeded to stall every hundred feet or so to the point where a rough-looking gentleman watching my utter inability to drive the little red sports car walked over and “volunteered” to drive it for me.

I quickly understood that doing so would result in the permanent disappearance of the car, which was not mine, or CNN’s, to donate to urban mayhem.

Perhaps 20 years later, as an employee of then Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, the company kindly offered to teach those who wanted to learn to drive a stick shift, some lessons and an opportunity to practice on its test track.

I failed the test miserably. Let’s just say the poor Dodge Challenger couldn’t withstand the challenge of a guy who literally could not get it in gear.

Now this makes me sad because car culture tells us there is true pleasure in moving up and down through the gears, exercising superior control over a vehicle and, yes, feeling like a bit of a badass—as opposed to letting an automatic transmission do all the work and having all the fun, but handling all the responsibility of controlled operation.

Doesn’t really seem satisfying, even though it’s a lot less work.

But that’s how I feel about using artificial intelligence to create copy.

You pop up whatever AI tool you like, enter the information and what you’d like the bot to do with it, then sit back and let it drive to the corner of  “got it done” and “exerted no effort.”

How satisfying is that? Well, I guess for those who are lazy, untalented or take no pride in their work it must be nirvana.

Oh, I was a fan of Nirvana, but not grungy copy.

I love writing. It’s never work for me. Ever. Sometimes it’s more challenging, but that’s what makes succeeding all the more satisfying.  

I get off on the thrill of coming up with just the perfect turn of a phrase or an original way of expressing a thought—at least in my mind.

I don’t submit a piece of copy for publication unless I feel I gave it my best effort at the time, but knowing I can always improve.

Now don’t start with nonsense like, “oh, he’s an old geezer Luddite too feeble or unwilling to handle advance technology.”

I don’t need an assist from AI to call “bullshit” on that.

Indeed, I embrace AI, but only as a tool, not the carpenter using it.

There are times when I feel blocked about a certain concept and I hit a dead end trying to express it. I’ll use AI to make suggestions. I won’t use any of them, but those suggestions will often kickstart my brain to form my own, original phrasing or structure.

The key is I want to be the one who did the work, will take pride in the work and responsibility for it.

Yeah, it’s like driving with a stick shift rather than an automatic transmission.

 It’s more satisfying to feel the rpms, make the shift changes seamlessly at just the right time, feel totally in control and enjoy the experience, thrill and knowledge you controlled it all.

Oh, the automatic will get you there with minimal effort, just as AI will do all the work for you—but no matter how deluded you are, it’s not your work and you’re not entitled to any feeling of accomplishment.

I may have been an utter failure at driving a car with a manual transmission, but when it comes to writing, I’ll stick with my personal AI, actual intelligence, to come through in the clutch.    

Mixus Uses the Other AI To Ensure Accuracy

In the world of artificial intelligence, when the technology spits out inaccurate information, instead of calling it what it is, a screw up, the industry invented a softer euphemism—hallucination. Those hallucinations have the potential of causing physical or financial harm, or at the least, a major embarrassment. 

But a months-old startup called mixus.ai has added a very analog backstop to catching errors before they do any harm—the human brain. Indeed, its name is a portmanteau of  mix and us, meaning blending artificial with human intelligence to help ensure accuracy.

The simple explanation is when a user makes an AI query, in addition to a AI-generated response mixus.ai also recommends people who have expertise, experience or knowledge on the specific topic. The user can then add those recommended people into their chat and converse with them and AI together.

Building on that original model, mixus.ai has now added an even more powerful tool it calls “colleague in the loop” AI agents, which can conduct a vast array of tasks such as generating social media posts, recruiting talent, drafting and sending emails, to name a few.

The twist is, the content goes nowhere until trusted human beings in a user’s network act as editors and fact-checkers.

“By bringing colleagues into the loop, you get the full power of AI agents, the efficiency and the time savings, etc, without any of that downside risk of AI mistakes going undetected,” explained Elliot Katz, who co-founded mixus.ai with Shai Magzimof. 

Creating AI agents on mixus does not require any sort of coding or programming knowledge, just the ability to read and write. 

Mixus.ai co-creators Shai Magzimof and Elliot Katz

“The beauty of this is someone who’s never used AI, someone who doesn’t even know what an AI agent is, you can create  and use agents on mixus,” declared Katz, in an interview. 

In the video below, Katz demonstrates how a colleague in the loop AI agent is created in mixus. 

There’s no shortage of examples of the volume of AI hallucinations causing companies and individuals to swoon from their effects. 

A report released in April by OpenAI, which operates the popular ChatGPT platform, revealed its o3 model hallucinated over 50% of the time, meaning every other answer was incorrect. And OpenAI’s o4-mini model performed even worse: nearly four out of five responses were wrong, meaning it fabricated answers nearly 80% of the time.

A very recent example occurred just last month when a summer reading list written by a syndicated freelance writer using AI appeared in such major market newspapers as the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer.

As reported in the Sun-Times, the writer admitted he never double-checked the results of his AI search which was incredibly unfortunate because several of the book titles in the list never actually existed, making the AI-generated summaries equally false. 

Katz contends it’s an example of a situation that could have been prevented by use of the colleague in the loop system.

“They could be using mixus, and they could have rules that are brought out through mixus, that say, before you publish anything, you have to have your editor or a colleague or multiple colleagues press that verify button, meaning they’ve actually reviewed what the AI put out is real and not total slop, etc,” Katz said. 

Investors are backing the mixus.ai playbook. The company just closed its $2.6 million pre-seed funding round which included participation by Liquid 2, former NFL star quarterback Joe Montana’s venture capital firm. 

Access to mixus.ai is by subscription. The company offers a free, 14-day trial to individuals using a business or personal email address. After that period, anyone who wants to continue as a user will need to contact mixus for “custom pricing,” according to Katz. 

Since launching late last year, mixus.ai has changed its business model from B to C, targeting consumers, to now targeting businesses, for which, errors can be more consequential according to Katz.

“We want colleagues in the loop,” said Katz. “We are working with businesses that want to deploy AI agents in a way that they don’t have to deal with these undetected AI mistakes.” 

You can listen or watch the entire interview with Elliot Katz and an extended demonstration of the mixus.ai colleague in the loop AI agent creation tool in the author’s podcast Tales From the Beat.