Tuesday 2¢ - To Err is not Just Human

This week's 2¢ is, to be honest, a simple and somewhat dull suggestion, based on goldfish.

For probably a decade or so, the marketing world has been banging on about humans having the attention span of goldfish, or maybe less.

You know the one, a goldfish has the attention span of 9 seconds, and at some point in 2015, we humans dropped below 8.

Which, as the BBC shared in 2017 is bullshit.

I discovered this years ago while preparing a presentation. I was going along with the perceived crowd wisdom and decided to throw myself down the rabbit hole of discovering where this scientific “fact” had come from.

It’s widely attributed to Microsoft, but my journey, as is the case for many people who bother to check their facts, was one of links that led to links that led to links... but no definitive source, until I found the 2017 BBC article that debunked the myth.

And yet, today, search for the quote and limit the results to the last four weeks and you will find that some lazy ass writer is STILL claiming this to be true as justification that we marketers need to do a thing.

There is a part of our collective marketing hive mind that still believes this goldfish quote to be true.

This is one example, and of course, the internet hive mind is riddled with stuff like that - things that are our truths, but may not be so true.

And, if you’ve ever gone down that road of tracing the source of a quote you’d like to use, you know how tortured doing that work can be; there are layers of people quoting people quoting people.

But, do it, you must.

However, when generative AI indexes this flawed sum of human knowledge and chooses a poorly sourced quote, we are SHOCKED, because, I guess, we expect it to do a better job than we can.

To err is human, as the quote goes.

Which, before you ask, is from An Essay on Criticism, one of the first major poems written by the English writer Alexander Pope (1688–1744), published in 1711.

In defence of the robots - for this specific example, if you do a search on Google for the quote about goldfish attention spans, and you live in a region where Google AI Overviews have been rolled out, the robot will tell you it’s a myth.

I was wondering if this is a bit like the debate about autonomous vehicles, at some point, they may kill someone, but they will kill WAY fewer people than we do.

OK..

Aside from my attempt to spice this up with a reference to road deaths, the conclusion is quite dull - check your sources.

Then check the sources of your sources.

And probably their sources too.

Generative AI may be better than we are, but it won’t be perfect.

Plus, of course, any website that ChatGPT cites could use all the clicks you can give it, in this seemingly link-love-starved world.

That’s my 2 cents for this week, thank you for giving it your ever diminishing attention 🙂

BTW - the full line of that poem - To Err is Human; to Forgive, Divine