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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 find that using AI as a non-coder requires a fundamental change in how you think about things. Imagine you have a generally competent software engineer as your personal servant, and he commands a legion of data-entry interns: what can you now do that you previously couldn't do? Talking about work would be giving away the secret sauce, so I'll give another example. I write poetry, and I have many poet friends. I had AI spin up a database of poetry publishing outlets - journals, magazines, etc. - and create a bot that can a) scrape any given url and, if it publishes poetry, get its info, submission windows, required formatting, etc., b) tell you which outlets are open for submission, which require fees, which pay you, etc., c) answer natural-language questions like "I've written a poem about my faith, what Catholic outlets are currently accepting submissions?". From there, automating formatting your submission and sending it to the journals would be pretty easy, but I chose not to do that out of respect for the editors. There are probably a surprising number of things in your life that can be made easier with a simple personalized CRUD app, but almost nobody is grokking that yet (to be fair, I've spent an inordinate amount of time around software engineers for a wordcel, so I have a lot more pre-loaded intuitions about architecture and planning in this space).
This is a great way of framing it. The AI is even more helpful than this because it's also an extremely useful encyclopedia. I've been using it very effectively to write me relatively simple apps and programs that marginally improve my quality-of-life but which my amateur ass doesn't have the time or skill to write. For example, an ad-free personally catered music-player that I now use daily and is an actual joy to use. I have also been using it extensively to identify trees and plants which has been both very educational, interesting and useful. I, for one, have been impressed. 2020 could never.
As for my work, I don't use or interact with AI at all and hopefully it stays that way until I retire but it probably won't. I'm a truck driver.
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