Abstract:Often hated during its lifespan in product (1996-2006), Clippy – Microsoft’s Office Assistant, became a pop-culture icon in its afterlife. Delving into the plethora of memes featuring Clippy, we ask: why should a questionable character from a software program that has been out of use for well over a decade have so vibrant an afterlife? If Clippy has become a rhetorical resource, what is it being used to do? We propose that Clippy’s dual status as the original natural-language digital assistant, one that fell c… Show more
“…Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has championed the "opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful" 49 -as if we live for the second coming of Microsoft's ill-fated virtual assistant Clippy. 50 There's good news if you do, because Microsoft has a new virtual assistant called Copilot for its Office Suite. 51 Copilot shifts the focus of debates about AI to workplace productivity, while also highlighting the growing importance of cloud computing for enterprises.…”
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the hybrid private company–nonprofit’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) project,arrives just as the Government of Canada attempts to pass its own response to AI: the ArtificialIntelligence and Data Act (AIDA). Amidst ongoing debates over ChatGPT and its growing connectionsto major platforms, we draw attention to the complex web of policy concerns this very new technologyraises and urge greater consideration of the information commons as a key policy frame to understandAI chatbots and the large-language models (LLMs) used to train them. ChatGPT could not exist withoutthe collective production of resources to support and maintain these commons, and its exploitation ofthem will only continue as OpenAI and its competitors search for ways to monetize chatbots.
“…Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has championed the "opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful" 49 -as if we live for the second coming of Microsoft's ill-fated virtual assistant Clippy. 50 There's good news if you do, because Microsoft has a new virtual assistant called Copilot for its Office Suite. 51 Copilot shifts the focus of debates about AI to workplace productivity, while also highlighting the growing importance of cloud computing for enterprises.…”
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the hybrid private company–nonprofit’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) project,arrives just as the Government of Canada attempts to pass its own response to AI: the ArtificialIntelligence and Data Act (AIDA). Amidst ongoing debates over ChatGPT and its growing connectionsto major platforms, we draw attention to the complex web of policy concerns this very new technologyraises and urge greater consideration of the information commons as a key policy frame to understandAI chatbots and the large-language models (LLMs) used to train them. ChatGPT could not exist withoutthe collective production of resources to support and maintain these commons, and its exploitation ofthem will only continue as OpenAI and its competitors search for ways to monetize chatbots.
“…These were historically mostly unidirectional, the assistant either asking a predefined set of questions to build its context representation or the user asking to perform some predefined tasks. Such badly designed assistants such as Clippy [63] could in the end disrupt the user, making it inefficient and frustrating. In a bidirectional relationship, the interaction is collaborative, with neither the system nor the user in control of the whole interaction [57].…”
Power grids are becoming more complex to operate in the digital age given the current energy transition to cope with climate change. As a result, real-time decision-making is getting more challenging as the human operator has to deal with more information, more uncertainty, more applications, and more coordination. While supervision has been primarily used to help them make decisions over the last decades, it cannot reasonably scale up anymore. There is a great need for rethinking the human-machine interface under more unified and interactive frameworks. Taking advantage of the latest developments in Human-Machine Interface and Artificial Intelligence, we expose our vision of a new assistant framework relying on an hypervision interface and greater bidirectional interaction. We review the known principles of decision-making driving our assistant design alongside its supporting assistance functions. We finally share some guidelines to make progress towards the development of such an assistant.
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