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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3169 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 6, 2024

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Figured this is a good place to ask about "AI". I'm putting that in quotes because a lot of things that are called AI aren't actually. But here I'm referring to any tools that are marketed as AI. Let's put this out there first, I don't trust AI. I don't trust it with my personal data, I don't trust it to get things right, I'm annoyed with how ubiquitous it's becoming in online articles and internet comments. I think a lot of companies are way over-hyping their products.

And yet at my workplace, there was a webinar called "how can AI work for you". And there's this whole lineup of self-described experts in the industry trying to sell it as a productivity tool - like actual, reputable sources. So I'm thinking, I'm 100% a Luddite, I've never been an early adopter, but maybe I should be taking it seriously.

Yet despite all the breathless copy about how AI can do absolutely anything, I've found actual, tangible examples thin on the ground. So I thought I'd ask the Mottizens - are you using AI and how? Has it made your workflow better? Give me your success stories!

If it helps, we can say I'm in facilities management. So I do scheduling, purchasing, administrative stuff, light tech support, process write-ups, document management, and I have a stuffed tasklist of both recurring things and current one-time projects I'm working on.

whole lineup of self-described experts in the industry trying to sell it as a productivity tool

No shortage of snake oil people around, looking for the next big thing to try to sucker people into swiping the credit card.

BUT!

It is a massive productivity tool.

Can’t speak to your day to day or possible ways it can help (in short: it can), but I’ve been using it for:

  1. In-house coder in building a practical web app (I can read a decent amount of code but I’ve never written code professionally). It’s helped me get to a working prototype in roughly 8 hours of prompting/testing/fixing/retesting.
  2. Trained GPTs for some very specific writing/editing projects, which allows me to get to a very solid first draft in about 10 minutes instead of 2 hours.
  3. Analyze thousands of rows of data and give some recommended actions, likely costs, potential benefits and timeframes. (This was SEO and web analytics data.)
  4. Teaching me loads of things. NOT information. More a conversation that allows me to go deeper in my self-education on a particular topic (e.g. coding, mathematics, finance, spreadsheet functions etc etc).

A broader more philosophical question is the possible impact of all this productivity on society and individuals. Will people become less resourceful? Will society as a whole become habituated to forcefed AI-generated soulless crap? Who knows. Probably second, third and fourth order effects that can’t be predicted. But overall, if you actually work with it rather than expect it to do something for you from start to finish, and then get good at working with it, you can fast track the hell out of a lot of things.

The value it has as basically being a "really smart friend" with infinite patience and an extremely deep well of knowledge is hard to overstate.

But man, if it gets to the point where you can actually start replacing your friends with it and it can fine-tune its responses to make an idealized conversation partner... or partners, no reason it couldn't simulate multiple roles in a conversation... it seems likely to drive further atomization.

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