How has AI impacted your job so far?

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I work in advertising, a large part of my role up until now has been copy writing. AI now writes all our content and I proofread it. Our clients don't know this, rightly or wrongly. It has been a huge time saving and my role has changed significantly.

Curious to know how AI is changing other industries

We have an in house version to use and I’ve found it brilliant when I need to write a report and can’t think how to word something or need help summarising something. I’ve got an interview later today and it’s also helped me to put some ideas for answers into STAR format ready for that.

If you can use AI to produce what effectively is your work then I would start considering another industry or career path sooner rather than later.

The shift towards AI is going to be massive and fast. It will be the ‘employee’ wrecking ball Amazon was to small retail businesses.

I‘m a dog walker and it’s made absolutely no difference whatsoever.

I’m with you, I’d personally be really worried if I could use AI so easily at work.

I am at the stage where I can't quite work out what to do with it or how to work it. I keep being told that AI can streamline or do bits of my job for me but it doesn't actually seem too.

I’m a translator and 80% of my clients have a clause in their contracts banning the use of AI because they’re worried about data confidentiality. I don’t know when that will change but I’ve been thinking about retraining for a while now.

Part of my job is adapting marketing copy, which involves translating and making sure the length of the text fits with the images, and that the key words appear in the right places. AI can kind of do that but not as well as me. Yet.

On thing I do wonder is what will happen if most of the content on the Internet is AI generated, won’t there be a point when it’s just feeding on itself?

I also worry about people using it to write things that they wouldn’t be able to write themselves. Where is the line between using it because it’s easier and using it because you don’t know enough about what you’re writing about?

It hasn't, I am a foster carer.

Teacher. I use it sometimes in the way I use other online resources - for ideas for lesson plans, assessments, etc.

RG academic here; I use it to create the structure of lectures which I’ll then review and adapt. I might use it to rewrite paragraphs occasionally, and to think of activities or case studies. However, it’s not yet good enough for what I need it to do. If I ask it to write a lecture it mainly gives me something very shallow that only scratches the surface of what I need to do so it’s usually better to do it myself.

It’s a huge problem in academia. It’s rife across assessments and it actually makes me angry that I have to spend time marking an essay that a student probably hasn’t even read. It’s easy to identify a ChatGPT essay (it’s perfectly written and generic) but it’s hard to prove it (yet). I am happy for students to use it for structure and ideas but I am conscious that there will be students entering the job market who are not worthy of their degrees. We had largely moved away from exams and vivas as form of assessment but these will be making a big come back over the next few years.

I'm a carer so it doesn't affect what I do at all. Besides, I don't want to outsource my own thinking.

Interesting or worrying comment from a PP about AI cutting study time in half. That means the student cannot be as educated and well-rounded in the subject as someone who put the hours in to learn, there will be massive gaps in knowledge and understanding. Fingers crossed that only exam question scenarios ever come up in the job!

It's been billed as the future so much in my field. But it's massively overblown. The ai meeting minutes are scarily bad. They look good at a glance because they follow structure rules. But the content misses key things, and uses flowery language to say nothing.

I'm concerned that the web is filling up with AI guff that will self perpetuate until the internet is useless.

Another thing is energy consumption. I don’t actually know much about this but is it sustainable to use energy in this way? I think there’ll be a backlash at some point - AI will used but I don’t think we can imagine exactly what that will look like yet.

In one of the early episodes of Downton Abbey they get electricity in the house and some of them are afraid of it, a few think it’s a good thing but it doesn’t look like any of them realise everything it could do. I think that’s kind of where we’re at now with AI.

Honestly, its been a waste of time. Apart from helping me wordsmith a few emails.

When asked to help me code, it looks pretty but it doesnt actually generate functioning code. It also hallucinates badly when used for any sort of technical writing. Misquoting academic papers etc. The content I asked it to generate for patient facing literature was both dangerous and comical.

Its ok for automating some very tightly defined tasks but as a helpful tool its still a long way off.

By removing the human/machine interface mostly, but so many other areas.

Not at all. AI can't hand mould composite or wood parts or glue them in place or install components. It can't use a spanner or a torque wrench or hunt for that bushing that fell down a tiny hole (not that I'm much good at that either...)

It has been used to automate minutes of meetings but I haven't bothered to look at them as we still also have the proper human written minutes.

May I ask how it's improved health and safety?

We using it to track mechanical failures, analysis which parts/operations fail most often, in order to move to bespoke reliability centred maintenance, rather than (potentially excessive, potentially dangerous) planned preventative maintenance . Basically, by looking at various factors., we can carry out maintenance only when needed rather than "just in case", so reduce the time our workforce is exposed to hazards.

I have heard of somebody writing books with it and publishing on Amazon. I can usually identify A.I text straight away. The issue lies if they're tweaking parts afterwards; that is more difficult.

Are you self-hosting your own AI servers or are you using a public one?