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Great Another AI Post.
On the front page of Meddit today is a post that basically goes "AI convinced my patient that eating toilet paper helps with constipation." This to my experience appears to be the norm.
In Medicine I've found AI to be of limited utility, because mistakes are not allowed and the required error checking usually nullifies productivity gains.
In Programming it seems to be hot shit because error checking is part of the job and required either way.
Other fields things get more complicated and I have less experience. But the usual people seem excited and the usual people seem frustrated.
So I want to know, for those of you who use AI for work outside of programming (and not to simplify tasks for hobbies/personal life) what are you actually using it for, how is it helping your discipline? I am endlessly fascinated by the immense gap between people who love it and hate it.
Also, for those of you who know a bit more about LLMs, the lack of true error correction seems to be a fundamental problem, is their any hope of this actually being addressed without completely changing away from LLMs?
I entered a bunch of medical data to Astra and asked it to recommend some protocols for me. It told me to stop taking my B1 vitamin (it helps with my neuropathy but ChatGPT says there’s no proof it does that), ask my doctor to reduce my thyroid prescription (!), and make sure I eat 100g of protein a day. Yeah it’s really not there yet.
On the other hand I regularly consult ChatGPT while cooking. It’s very handy at proposing substitutions or modifying a recipe. (“Hi ChatGPT please give me a recipe like pudding choumer but with these two ripe bananas I have lying around”. “I dont have milk how about yogurt.”)
I would say AI replaces Google searches and Wikipedia half the time now. It’s very good at complex but discrete questions I couldn’t otherwise get at without a lot of searching. (“Hi ChatGPT I just read this article about pilot pay in the WSJ. Give me a sense of the amount of jobs in maintaining the airline industry, grouped by pay, first in America, then comparing to Canada Europe and Asia.”)
AI is very good for language practice and basically eliminates the need for me to have a workbook. I tell it what grammatical concepts I’m working on, it designs infinite exercises, I don’t have to flip to the back of the book, I can ask for clarification, I can ask for harder or simpler longer or shorter.
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