There are not many AI products that I both love and hate. Poke is one of them.
When I went through its onboarding last October, it was one of the few products I had used that felt like it had agency.
If I remember right, there was not much discussion about agency then, especially in the Chinese context.
At some point its way of speaking changed completely. It started to feel greasy and formulaic. I strongly suspect a model change was much more likely than a prompt change. 🧐
Then today it said something that made me very, very, very… annoyed. In one kind of Chinese slang, it was extremely cringe. Truly—if a person apologised to me like this, I would tell them to get lost, turn around, and never look back 🙃
I do not oppose AI products feeling alive. But using a performance of apology to cover up the fact that behaviour has not actually been corrected… that is such classic “bad boy behaviour”.
Before the end of last year, I sent the team a few emails about problems I had while using the product. Later I noticed that some of the things I mentioned had clearly improved, like continuity in the conversation.
I have still been giving feedback recently. The trigger this time was… its memory system is just too bad. It is so unpleasant to use. Why would it keep holding onto keywords that I have clearly said are no longer what I am focused on?
So silly. 🙂
Honestly, it is rare for a new product to keep me around for almost eight months.
For it to make me scold it… even rarer 😭 (Wait! Why am I scolding a product? It is innocent! 🥺)
I once praised Elys for having a good memory system, but I have not used it again since the middle to late part of March. Still, among the products I was trying at that time, its memory system was genuinely pretty OK.
Then again, no product can meet every need, right?
That is fine. If one product meets one part of a need, use it for that part, and let other products fill in the rest.
This, this, this… feels so much like what people need from relationships…
So real life is teaching me how to become a better curator~
(Please! I hope the Interaction team makes Poke better! 🥺)