Using AI for quotes - Don't!

[Dos_Box]

I thought I'd post this up as a general thing to be aware of.
Yesterday I was talking to a member who had someone submit a quote to them for some replacement kit.
The quote came back with very low ball figures which beat any the member could get.
It turns out the school office in question used AI to go and get quotes that bore no relationship to the actual market prices.
They also made up a couple of quote from imaginary suppliers!

 

The TLDR is to make sure your schools have a policy in place for getting in quotes that actually involve contacting real suppliers and not asking AI to do it, and have legitimate contact details for each.

[DalekSec]

I'm still waiting for this whole AI crazy to die down,

 

My big realization on why not to use it for a lot of things was after it kept getting IT knowledge etc wrong, then i realised i was using it for non-IT bits i knew little about but then i though if it's wrong for IT how do i now its not wrong for other bits? Then found myself double checking everything it was saying and using more time than before!

 

I tend to only use it to reword bits or an advanced search engine. 

[Rob_D]

I'm sorry... What?

How would that work?

How would someone expect that to work? It's not like GPT can email the suppliers or have magical access to their price lists.

 

Okay, so when I ask co-pilot "how much would I expect to pay for a 64gb memory stick?", the only problem with the answer was it only picked products from amazon US (despite giving me the price in £).

 

 

[Dos_Box]

1 minute ago, Rob_D said:

I'm sorry... What?

How would that work?

How would someone expect that to work? It's not like GPT can email the suppliers or have magical access to their price lists.

 

Okay, so when I ask co-pilot "how much would I expect to pay for a 64gb memory stick?", the only problem with the answer was it only picked products from amazon US (despite giving me the price in £).

 

 

Because people believe the hype around AI I suspect. Yes, AI is good for some things but, IMO, not interacting with the real world.

[synaesthesia]

Holy hell - that's a gross misconduct disciplinary at best and instant dismissal at worst. Anyone caught trying that should be done for fraud. Working with budgets as tight as in education is tough, and any decent supplier will understand and empathise with that, but those suppliers also have bills to pay. Disgusting that it even needs saying

[Dos_Box]

17 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

Holy hell - that's a gross misconduct disciplinary at best and instant dismissal at worst. Anyone caught trying that should be done for fraud. Working with budgets as tight as in education is tough, and any decent supplier will understand and empathise with that, but those suppliers also have bills to pay. Disgusting that it even needs saying

Pretty much what others in the group chat said!

[PotNoodleTech]

I mean you'd have to be a moron to think doing this would be a good idea? 

 

These are the type of people we need warnings for on bleech saying do not drink.

[dmj]

Weird one, because AI should be good at talking to a suppliers API and giving a quote based on the output. It's not there yet, but a lot of (especially electronics) suppliers do offer api functionality. I think this would be doable with a well written prompt, to a specific endpoint. 

[mikes]

You should have called them up on it - "Those quotes are great can you get me more info" and see what they do then!