Does AI help you? Or even will the potential help?

Beer Baron 🍺 said:

I have a big fear with AI/LLMs that I'm not seeing addressed in the general discussion. I'm very afraid of having corporate management using it for short term efficiency gains at the expense of major long term knowledge destruction.

I think businesses will use it to replace low-level human work, but not high level knowledge. But then eradicate the next generation of people with high-level knowledge because no one got employed to do menial tasks to build their knowledge and skills.

So, my wife knows how to program in several different languages including COBOL. AI is not going to replace her. She has a deep understanding of these systems and how they work that AI can't really be trained to. She built that knowledge and skill base by doing a lot of hacking really basic code earlier in her career. Now, AI can replace the version of her from 15 or 20 years ago that just hacked simple code. She can use it as a tool to replace a pool of code monkeys. But with those code monkeys gone, there is not a new generation building deep understanding of these systems. Eventually she and others in her generation will retire and all of that knowledge will be lost. We'll be left with LLM's that can write a bunch of code really fast, but not people who understand it well enough to patch it into existing systems.

See also, the cognitive prosthesis theory of AI:

https://www.psypost.org/catastrophic-effects-can-ai-turn-us-into-imbeciles-this-scientists-fears-for-the-worst/

An interesting an underappreciated background feature in Idiocracy is how AIs run everything - like Carl's Jr and the restaurant formerly known as Fuddruckers, the prison system, the hospital etc...it probably wasn't intended, but a plausible backstory is that the AIs could've contributed to making people less intelligent and/or capable.

You know that we are screwed when the first thing AI perfected was the ability to lie.

alfadriver said:

z31maniac said:

californiamilleghia said:

I am the  Great Unwashed Masses , I understand a little  , but many of your replies above are "Greek" to me ....

I think the  Great Unwashed Masses are scared of much of the clickbait that gets in the news , 

We will see what the App is that stops the  Great Unwashed Masses being scared and they want to use it because  its fun and maybe useful.

 

There are a lot of free courses to help you learn how to use it. Even in my small group at work, we are seeing people push back against it, instead of embracing whats happening and learning new skills. 

You can be mad, don't like it, etc. That's how I was 6 months ago. Learning new things and being able to do my job better.

 

I don't know about y'all, I need that paycheck every 2 weeks, the health insurance for my better half. 

But other than programming, how does it really help?  Seriously.  

In theory, I can see that it can help process data from tests that I used to do.  But I'm not all that sure that's super helpful- what it could lead to is brain drain thanks to fewer people needed to develop cars.  Honestly, the process to develop cars can't speed up much- it still will take time to make the prototypes, it still takes time to test them, and the data processing time is rather small compared to all of that.  So all it really helps is reducing the number of people you might need- and I don't see that as a good thing, as it means that people have less time to solve problems (since AI can't do that).  Spreading talent out isn't ideal when things are so varied.

If I'm so busy that I need AI to write e-mails for me, is that really a good thing?  If I use AI to generate a resume- that's certainly a bad sign for businesses.  

More efficient only works when the amount of work that you can additionally handle can be dealt with at a better standard than before.  If it's worse, then it's not better.

This whole thread is about how AI makes your life better.  So far, all I have seen where it really makes a big difference is in programming and then IF you have a huge amount of people inputting teaching data, then processing huge amounts of data that is odd can work- like ID'ing cancer or shapes of galaxies.  But other than that?

I don't see a machine writing my emails as a benefit, especially since we now have AI interpreting messages from others.  I don't see AI making pictures or avetars as anything special.  Especially not working anymore, I still have not seen how AI can make my life better at all so that I have to use whatever is on this laptop or get a new phone with it.

Well, I will give you an example that isn't programming. 

I think most who frequent the forum know I'm a Technical Writer. We get doc issues, we have developed a prompt that will go through a doc issue record that may have 50+ entries from devs and QA on what we need to fix. That prompt will grab all the highlights, who has posted the most comments, etc. 

We can do the same thing with long email chains. 

I would tell everyone if you can afford a Coursera plan for a few months, do it. There are a lot of good courses about how to use AI. 

Since I was being a bit of smart ass about naive vs advanced prompts.You have to give more information, context, to get a good answer. 

For example, you can give ChatGPT a prompt like and use a persona "You are dietitian, I need a high fiber, high protein diet, can you develop a weekly meal plan for me?" And there are multiple different LLMs. 

And you can go deeper with prompts. More context, etc. And you can do silly stuff as well like. 

"You are a pirate, rewrite this text" Or a Victorian woman, etc. 

In reply to z31maniac :

I did point out emails and summaries, but if you need AI because of too much or too many communications, is it a good thing that you get to handle more?  Or should people learn to communicate better?

More is better if the output is equal or better.  It's worse if the output declines.

Personally I'm so sick of seeing AI forced into every piece of software I interact with despite nobody asking for it. I don't want AI in my search results, I don't want it to pretend to be a friend and chat with me, I don't want it to generate a crude representation of the already-existing thing I'm trying to find. I'm sick of all the people in my social feeds sharing AI-generated images of impossible baked goods and quilts and knitting projects and recipes fully believing they're real, and I'm sick of having to explain that things aren't real to people who no longer care what's real and what's not, or people who will believe wrong information from a computer model over a person with expertise just because the computer model's wrong answer comes first on Google. I'm sick of the wealthy and powerful using AI to access "art" and "talent" without having to give the artistic and talented (whose work the generative models were illegally trained on) access to any wealth in return. I'm sick of how much energy and water AI uses to generate all this slop, and I'm sick of how nobody seems to care about these downsides when they're discssing hypotheticals of how it can make them more productive, as if that's the only thing that matters in the end.

/end rant

In reply to Nicole Suddard :

You hit on a very good point on the LLM's and what they are trained on. I refuse to use public AI models because it utilizes data from unknown sources with potential copyright infringements. 

All of the AI I use is corporate trained LLMs that are all internal data and information. I hate the public models are potentially taking $$$ out of the pockets of hard working creatives. 

In reply to bmw88rider :

That's not how it works. We are only allowed to use internal models for work, but it's still trained on the internet. Like all other LLMs. That's how they all learn from. Trust me, a few months ago I didn't care for AI. Now that I have taken a lot of training on it, I know the help and limitations. 

You can ask things like

When I ask a question, can you provide me a better version?

Like "Why is the sky blue?"