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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 work in aged care.
The only significant use I have seen for it at work thus far is listening to and transcribing conversations in meetings, like an automated secretary.
Management also set up a policy bot, so you can ask the bot about the existing policies on such-and-such procedure, and it will search through the intranet and tell you, but thus far it does not seem to be widely used.
For the most part I think nobody knows what it is. All the doctors and RNs I talk to make their own judgements, and find the idea of outsourcing patient welfare decisions to a computer terrifying. Personal care workers and lifestyle workers have no use for it. Residents mostly have no idea what it is. I appear to have been identified by a few co-workers as relatively tech-savvy (you help people log in or troubleshoot a computer problem a few times and suddenly you have a reputation...), so there have been a few cases where I have reluctantly explained to people what ChatGPT is and how you use it. In practice I try not to encourage its use, though.
The most visible use of LLMs or bot-generated content I see at work, as I've commented before, is via YouTube slop. We have large televisions that can access YouTube and sometimes use them to play music, classic movies, church services, the news, or anything else residents might be interested in. Search results are increasingly polluted by AI-gen content, and sometimes YouTube automatically rolls over to them. This is a regular if minor frustration for care and lifestyle workers looking for good shows or playlists.
I probably can't generalise from my field, but if I had to guess, I'd say that for most jobs 'on the ground', which require either interacting with people or interacting with real, physical things, AI/LLMs/bots remain a solution looking for a problem. I know my case that the site manager is quite technophilic and is intrigued by the potential for AI, but thus far the use cases just don't exist.
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