AI is starting to undermine our trust in ourselves.

No, they do not care about the environment. But the people who live near the planned huge data centres do. So many of those projects are dead in the water.

But the AI industry bods DO care about the rate at which users are burning through their venture capital. Cos so far they haven’t worked out how to make it profitable.And original investors need new hyped up investors to come and throw more money into the burning pit of cash, so the OGs can get their investment out safely.

As it stands at the moment it could just be a massive Ponzi scheme. Most of the hype doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I do enjoy using it, and there are several areas where when guided by my expertise it has saved me a shedload of scutwork. But if I had to pay what my usage really costs the provider…. not a hope in hell that I could afford it.

I've tried a number of search engines, but for my work I need to do detailed web searches with estimated counts, exact phrases and so on and sadly I haven't found anything that matches up to Google.

switch to Ecosia. It does all that but is also solar-powered and plants trees as you search.

AI is the stupidest thing that will end up having the biggest impact on humanity. It is changing us at a fast rate, together with social media based on slot-machine-like algorithms.
We are all losing awareness of our surroundings and any survival skills, let alone critical thinking. With brains geared to favour AI ‘girlfriends’, full focus on dopamine,
and ignoring real threats, like keeping a mad president in power, even though he might nuke us all tomorrow… I think, that’s it’s for the Homo Sapiens…

Trained experts working with AI - now you’re talking. Experts using AIs to do the grunt work that graduate entry and junior employees would usually do in coding, software design, building websites, law, finance, accounting etc etc.
But where will the next generation of trained experts come from, if there are few opportunities for graduates and junior employees to hone their skills because AI has been doing all the grunt work for them?

I’m curious though. I do fewer google searches and such using AI first. I think it reduces my browsing clicks. I am wondering if that is actually better environmentally, but also if we reduce or stop “normal” free search engines, what happens if AI doesn’t have the source material to mine in the first place

I deliberately never use it. I have set my Google search to not use AI, I use Firefox which has a no-AI option, I never use AI to give me summaries or help me write...

I cannot see any possible gain for me in using AI tools to do something I can do perfectly well myself, without trashing the environment still further.

True and very depressing.

Unfortunately the people who are developing AI at speed don’t give a crap about the environment.
Nor do users, who spend hours chatting with their new friend or developing stupid videos, asking stupid questions, moving further away from reality.

The "burning through tokens" is another huge issue that isn't talked about nearly enough. We're undoing all the pitiful gains we've made in protecting the environment with this AI nonsense.

Which will be especially fun when the “lack of trained up talent” mountain meets the “now you have to pay enough to cover the cost of your usage” hard place.

I nearly fell over when I discovered the gap between what I pay and how many tokens (the unit used by the industry to quantify the cost to produce output) I burn through. My subscription covered maybe the first week usage of every month. And I’m not doing anything complicated or demanding.

Claude is so sycophantic it's hilarious. I know you can cue it to be less so, but by default. Everything is "incredibly insightful" and "razor sharp" and "rare". Must be a narcissist's dream come true.

ChatGPT is good at translating short texts and emails though. That is very useful.

Absolutely this. Are people really so shortsighted that they cannot see that younger generations are rapidly going to lose the opportunity to develop skills we take for granted? Of course it's lovely to opt out of the boring stuff and choose to do the creative bits IF you have those skills. Which you develop by doing the boring stuff.

with massive productivity gains because the AIs don’t need time off, don’t get stuck, don’t need to sleep or eat or have babies

Humans are so inconvenient 😒 keep taking the soma

Experts using AIs to do the grunt work that graduate entry and junior employees would usually do in coding

Where are those experts coming from in 10 years when the current experts retire and AI has removed the ladder of junior grunt work?

I think AI is a pretty good search engine but it cant be anything more. Ie: “where can I go tomorrow (date) that is good for children aged (x and x) within an hour journey from x postcode?” And even sometimes things will be more than an hour, or not open etc. But it is a faster way to get there than googling.

Plus I know from talking to friends that young people are putting their covering letters and CVs through it and everything is starting to look like a bland robotic lump.

Trained experts who can take liability if they get something badly wrong. Unlike a machine.

Trained experts, who still make mistakes, fail to listen, don’t keep up with the latest r&d in their field. Are we holding AI to higher standards than human trained experts?

Trained experts working with AI - now you’re talking. Experts using AIs to do the grunt work that graduate entry and junior employees would usually do in coding, software design, building websites, law, finance, accounting etc etc. with massive productivity gains because the AIs don’t need time off, don’t get stuck, don’t need to sleep or eat or have babies or get bored. I think we are shielded from this in the UK atm, because we lag so far behind the US in tech development, same with Europe. It’s early days.

That is what trained experts are for.

It hallucinates as much in translation as it does everywhere else and should not be used for anything of consequence.

I used our AI at work for a couple of things. The first was my annual PDP. I asked it to rewrite it as a SMART objective with a 70/20/10 plan, then I wrote what I wanted to do and achieve in the year. Took me a few minutes and what came out scored me above the score of 25 out of 30 our business looks for for a quality PDP. I obviously read through it and checked I was happy with it, which I was.

the second thing I used it for was only last week. I had a document I wanted to launch to the wider business, and I was asked to present it in our periodic huddle. I was absolutely swamped, it got to the day before and I hadn’t had time to create the presentation yet. So I decided to see if the AI could do it for me. In under 5 mins (I uploaded the document for it to read) it had given me the content to paste into power point (I then used the design options to pretty it up) and then wrote me speaker notes. I read through them, and the style was very much in line with a presentation I had written completely on my own a month previously. I asked people afterwards and they also felt it sounded like I had written it.

So I’ve used it and found it helpful. But I wouldn’t use it for writing a post on here or facebook. Or for writing an email or letter. But I’m good at writing job notes, emails, etc, and enjoy writing in general! So I wouldn’t want to use AI.

Yes it’s just so much more than translation. It’s Counselling, hand holding, interpretation, guidance, advice, strategising. And drafting documents and text, then tweaking it over and over until it’s perfect. it He has the paid version for work and it’s almost indefatigable - never runs out of capacity or patience (unlike me!). Anyone that has complex government forms or applications to complete - they should try it.

@TheLivelyAzureHedgehog AI has clearly been immensely valuable for you and your DH. Translation is one of the things it does really well.

I'm retired, so will not encounter it in my working life. I have used it twice, once to help write a presentation for a Spanish class that I was in (short of time) and again to suggest Christmas presents for six year olds. It was adequate, but a bit mechanical.