Back in May I wrote about asking ChatGPT and Claude where to put my circulator fan in my study. Last week the question was less relaxed and burning. The UK broke its June temperature record three days running, my study is a small room with the sun aimed straight at it, and I went back to both models to see if they could help.
What came back read well and annoyingly didn’t work. Both kept telling me to aim the air just above my head, which puts the column over you, and when I said it wasn’t working they’d tell me to nudge it up a little more and that I was nearly there, pointing me the whole time at a placement that wasn’t going to achieve what they calculated.
So I asked it to draw the room it had been working from, to show me what it had made of everything I’d given it, and it put the door on the wrong wall. I could see it was wrong, so I fed it more photos and asked again, and the door just landed somewhere else wrong, until I gave up on the diagram.
The diagram looked useful until the room it drew stopped matching the room I was standing in.
The living room got better, and not because of the AI. I worked it out on the floor, moving the fan a foot at a time, thinking back to school physics and the way air comes off a wall at the angle you give it, until I found the one that crossed the sofa instead of the bookcase, and after that it was somewhere you could sit through the afternoon.
This is what I spend my working life saying about AI in enterprise systems, except it was happening to me at home. It sounds exactly as sure of itself where it can’t check its answer as where it can, and with the fan there was nothing to check it against, no way to know whether the last suggestion had worked or to feel the air going over my head, so it just kept handing me the next placement in the same confident voice as the wrong one before.
The office is still too hot to use for long. It’s alright first thing but by mid-morning I have to get out, and on calls the fan has to go off because it’s too loud to talk over, so most of the day it’s either hot or quiet, not both. Next week it’s back up toward 31 and I’ll be in there again trying to sort it, because I need the room. There’s no portable AC to buy either, everywhere’s sold out, even my hotel last week had it broken on one side of the building. When it’s back in stock it’ll cost more, same as what’s happening with RAM at the moment.
The last time it was this bad I was renting a flat in London during Covid, and the only cool place was Victoria Park, colder under the trees than anywhere in the flat.