AI. How does it impact on your life so far and what do you think will happen next and further into the future?

[LindorDoubleChoc]

(Leaving aside the obvious immense worries about how it will negatively impact my young adult dc future)

I'm interested to see how we all perceive AI.

I'm in the final third of my life now so I don't feel it will impact me as much as everyone younger. But then again it might do? - just as new technology in the digital age was hard to embrace for the generations above me. I imagine I could be left behind by AI and not know how to handle it and that could leave me unable to fully function as a human in the near future (as per elderly relatives who couldn't use the internet). I'm not sure.

How does AI affect you now and how do you see that changing/progressing? I just haven't got the imagination to take it all in.

At the moment, I'm only aware of AI in social media - predominantly Mumsnet which is changed hugely already by it, but I've also seen quite a few non-human-written threads on Facebook Reels. Oh, and also my DH who works as a lecturer has talked to me about AI generated work from his students.

I have never used ChatGPT for instance, I wouldn't know how to or why I would want to.

P.S. the suggested title for this thread was "How do you think AI will affect your life over time?". Which do you think is the better thread title - mine or the AI version?

I'm seeing the tide turn against it slowly - it has been forced down our throats despite being shit and unreliable, it has decimated lots of the small businesses who are my clients and friends.

It's definitely had an impact on mine, I'm a photographer, but it can't replicate the experience or the feeling, never mind the actual expression as someone relaxes or connects or gets a confidence burst, so people are still coming to me, although it has been a much harder couple of years since AI went mainstream.

I can still wildly outperform it writing wise too, so using it for that would slow me down, take away what I enjoy about writing and give me more of what I dislike, editing - why would I do that?

To be honest that's probably a good summary generally, it seems to be trying very hard to take and automate all the things which make us human and leaving us to do the shit parts, which is not what I want from life, and that's without getting anywhere near the studies that show it reduces your brain function. Or the fact it's built on plagiarism from the same creatives it's now taking over clients from.

I think it probably has its place as a tool somewhere but it is SO unreliable, and the way it has been hurled and forced everywhere without any safeguarding, and now absolutely bloody everything - WhatsApp, social captions, even sodding Mumsnet titles - now suggests you rewrite it with AI, makes me sad and actively want to avoid it. Instagram asked me if I wanted to rewrite with AI when I was trying to message condolences about a very ill pet - absolutely the fuck not I want her to read my actual words!

It's a system which predicts the most likely next word, i.e. what sounds most like average. Why the fuck would I want that - I'd much rather read and see flawed but actual human writing and art.

What I can't figure out is why so many people think it's brilliant, given that for the very simple tasks I've asked it to do (things like working out interest, creating a calendar for planning availability, tell me about car windscreen replacements locally)
have about at 0.3% success/accuracy rate. How crap were they at life & their jobs before AI existed, if this is better?!

Every time I've searched for something I have knowledge about, the AI panel is not just wrong but has completely made stuff up - I've now switched the summary panel off because it was making me so angry and wasting so much of my time.

Backlash is starting because people are bored of everything looking the same and sounding the same.

Truly I think the bubble will burst at some stage and it will then just become something we use like excel or PowerPoint or something, not this all consuming everywhere bollocks it currently is, but I hope it doesn't fuck over the economy even more when it inevitably does.

It's hard to tell how it will change everything because the AI most of us use is (e.g ChatGpt) is miles behind the advanced AI that big companies have access to.

I think it is drastically changing the world of work and affecting some industries quite dramatically.
I agree with PP that at some point there will be a high profile disaster of some kind because AI is relied on too heavily & that at the moment it is being allowed to grow rampantly without much safeguarding around it.

But generally I think most of us are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of AI in our everyday lives so it's hard to properly judge what it's full impact is going to be.

I have a company paid for version of AI and I find it great for doing boring admin tasks, summarising information, collating information, etc. I like for planning documents too. You need to know the exact questions to ask, but I’ve found it brilliant.

Agree with the idea it’s taking the good creative bits and leaving the shit.

why do people use it for life admin? Epidemic of tiredness, busy-ness - it’s quick. It saves time researching and decisions fatigue; for me it’s symptomatic of asking too much of people. Feels a bit like ‘labour saving’ devices like hoovers and washing machines that then also increased the expectations

friends are finding they’re being asked to use it ‘to save time’ eg coding and then having to spend time doing the bit they don’t like which is testing and untangling/bug fixing. It’s making explicit how much money is the driver of everything and not the creative process or outcome.

interestingly many - I’d say the majority actually - of the 11-18 year olds I work with detest it, strongly criticise staff who use it and are very aware of the creative and environmental concerns. Cheating continues to be a thing with a few but it’s always been there, this is just a new way to do it.

Agree with the comments so far. I’m absolutely sick of generative AI to be honest, hate the way it’s been forced upon me and how it’s being peddled as the solution to everything at work by people who don’t really understand it. It’s making everything mediocre. I have colleagues who use it as their first step in a task without trying to do that task themselves and then spend ages unpicking and redoing the output - why bother?

When I see posters on here say “I asked ChatGPT about your post and it said blah” I just think fuck me are you not capable of independent thought? It’s destroying critical thinking. It’s making us all thick, and at great environmental cost.

However, other types of AI have their uses. Image recognition for instance, where it can be trained to spot certain things in images and save lots of time (and depending on use case, potentially saving lives in the process).

But generative AI can get in the bin and I’m seeing an increasing backlash against it both at work and among friends.

@hilariousnamehere “it seems to be trying very hard to take and automate all the things which make us human and leaving us to do the shit parts”

Exactly this, but we’re told we should use it because it does the opposite. Not in my experience.

I think there are parts of it that are brilliant. It has allowed me to completely transform the speed at which I do my work. I use it to help refine drafts of reports as well as generate some action plans based on the content.

It’s brilliant for doing things like writing letters that need to go to e.g. the council when there’s a certain structure or policy you need to base it on

It’s a great tool to engage with curiously. For example, you could prompt it by saying ‘I’m an artist and I want to make my own boards for oil painting. How would I go about preparing the traditional substrate? Give me a step-by-step guide.’
or/ Im a 55-year-old woman who hasn’t done exercise before and I’m trying to build up my upper body strength. But I only have 10 minutes each day to spare. Can you devise me a one month plan that incorporates a range of weights?

We live in a world where people who don’t use AI are not going to be overtaken by it but by people who do use it well. Certainly, it’s a job performance requirement for many professional firms now.

it will favour people who are good at prompt engineering, the process of giving it commands. If you’re thinking is disordered and incoherent, you’re not going to get anything good from AI.

DH has been made redundant.
DS played with it a lot but doesn’t use it at home much anymore. At work, he’s seen a paid for version do amazing things in the business analysis area. He uses it to speed up certain tasks at work. Things that he’d otherwise need to task someone to do.

I’m concerned about the impact on the environment. I find it shocking that my search engine automatically uses AI summaries for example. All that impact with no discussion.
Every effort we make towards zero carbon, every sacrifice, undermined by the casual use of AI.

Actually it did do a good admin task for me recently, tidying up a document that was going to take me quite a while.

I use it to aak questions like I've done this project plan what are its weaknesses. Its been ok at saying you havent thought about x.

But I do wonder how many decisions are being made by AI or Influenced by AI that impact on me that I dont know about. Is my LA using it, is healthcsre using it. Maybe my mortgage rate was set by ai

we use it in our team for summarising large reports, boring admin tasks, proof reading reports etc. it frees us up for seeing more patients (we have huge waiting lists). I don’t foresee it taking it over our jobs as we’re a patient facing role who need to make clinical decisions (some based on in person observations) that Ai just can’t do.

In my day job (finance) I see it getting pushed on websites all the time. But finance is numbers and accuracy, not words and feelings. Struggle to see a real life use case. I think in reality it will be added behind the scenes to existing products. Remember when the first dotcom boom happened and we were all going to buy pet food online. I mean it did happen in the end of course but took many years

I use it a lot at work. Its turned me into an absolute genius. However, you have to know your job very well to get a good result and then go to the relevant parts of legislation to make sure its correct.
Also I use it if I feel my correspondence is sounding curt or blunt, and even though you have to edit it to make it not read like AI its still far better having used it than not. I hate that I'm a fan knowing how damaging it can be.

It's a glorified google. Fine if you use it like that, but treat it like the oracle at your own peril. It is a text predictor, not intelligence.

It hallucinates. There will never be a model that doesn't.

Stupid managers have used it to remove entry level jobs at our place (coding). Not realising it takes experienced devs twice as long fixing the crazy mistakes than just doing it ourselves. And now no younger people can get the experience needed to see or fix how crappy ai coding is.

It impresses people who don't know what they are doing. It can create something shiny and quick, it may even work for a bit. But it will fuck up when you add it in. God forbid you get it to write a large project (shudders).

I really enjoy it as a tool. It’s my go to instead of Google, I use it a lot at home for things like food planning, recipes, research like finding a tv show to watch or holiday planning.

It’s transformed my work, mainly because I directly work in an AI field so obviously it’s keeping me busy, but also it’s picking up quite a bit of the drudgery aspects of my work. Quickly pulling together other emails, finding meeting slots for multiple people, just yesterday it devised me a study plan for a work exam I’m sitting in a couple of months. I find it very useful, but then because I’m close to it I am also quite careful and considered, confident in my use of it and understand the drawbacks.

Where it’s making my life harder is where people in my team who are less well versed in its practical use are using it badly. And when recruiting, I’ve seen a huge uptick in applicants since AI and the applications are so generic it’s really difficult to differentiate. But the plus side to that is getting a broader range of applicants, lots of people would be put off a civil service application in the past, so I do welcome a broader pool, but we are behind in working out how to deal with these applications currently.

I'm retired and have used it to plan workouts, answer more complex questions and so on. I do read around and fact check but have found it really useful.

It saved my life last month, I was in A&E not getting anywhere with my symptoms rapidly progressing and no one seeming to know what was going on. I put everything that was happening into chat gpt and asked what else I should be doing, it told me I had transverse myelitis, the junior Dr had never heard of it but it triggered a referral to the spinal team who came straight down. Chat GPT was right.

I'm an illustrator and have seen a huge drop off in commissions, as many places just churn out AI art and use it. A frequent collaborator used AI for some major promotion recently on their website and it wasn't even double checked as its such poor quality, the faces are all swirly and mashed and there are errors everywhere. It's a shame, and I've always had a full time job to keep secure while freelancing too, but some friends who are full time graphic designers etc have taken a huge hit. Most of us have degrees in the field too so it's not like losing a hobby.

That is more worrying about the state of the health service and their diagnostic tools.

Plenty at work.
Colleagues are divided about AI (usually they mean LLMs). I am in the skeptical camp. I do think of really good uses for AI in my work sphere, but no one ever says that they would use LLM for reasons I think of.

Colleague who likes LLM says it helps them write (admittedly this person makes a lot of mistakes in their writing without it; this is a native English speaker, just poor at writing correct details) or helps them programme (in scripting language they don't know at all). One colleague showed off functionality that he found in R that I found about 3yrs earlier using ordinary Google search.

One time I found a reason for doing something a certain way. I went to my boss to see if he agreed. He asked chatGPT which also agreed with my reasoning. Boss didn't check the LLM's sources. I shrugged...

Two colleagues used chatGPT to construct lists of suggested venues for promoting our products. Their suggestions were mostly crap and all otherwise unsuitable. I've had LLM commentary on my written reports (not officially allowed but it happens anyway): occasionally there is a useful comment, mostly rubbish and nonsensical otherwise, waste of time to document that I've checked for improvement from all the nonsense comments.

Personally: I mostly loathe the question prompts that Facebook adds to posts and reels. I avoid Google search so that I can avoid their LLM summaries. Adult DC said they use chatGPT to write more polite emails (bcz thats a great reason to use lots of energy and water and deskill your brain).

But AI is much more than just LLMs - so yes while people may be turning against AI generated slop on LinkedIn and the like, AI is not going away.

Yes agreed. We are currently in the era of Narrow AI, which functions like a specialised two-year-old, data scientists are working towards General AI and ultimately Super AI.

That’ll take AI to a whole new level which will put what we’re seeing now clearly in the rear view mirror! Not going to lie, even as someone who works in and endorses AI, it scares me.

@CypressGrove @dfitesh6753 fair points, my feelings are about LLMs/genAI specifically which I should have made clearer.

Things like voice assistants have changed life for the better for mum, gran and I, and I think as a tool it could probably be very useful.

But genAI has been pushed onto the general public with no safeguarding and no guidance and some very dubious heavy marketing and no opt out, like the pp said about searches and on Facebook posts/groups.

Not to mention it costs a lot more than they're currently charging so when the price inevitably goes up I'm not sure what the people reliant on it will do.

Plus RAM and SSD storage is wildly more expensive than it was a couple of years ago because of AI's usage - so many consequences for people and we didn't get any choice in the matter.

I think the problem is a lot of the general public who have an opinion on AI have either never used it, or used a free version of ChatGPT six months ago- AI is advancing so quickly now, the big companies are ploughing all their work into it and AI is now essentially developing itself. It's amazing what it can do now.

Of course gen AI and people using LLMs to create pictures of their cat on a motorbike are a horrendous use of the technology and a waste of resources- but the toothpaste is out of the tube now, we've given access to everyone, we can't go back.

As a self-employed person its transformed my business and allowed me to automate a lot of the time consuming tasks that free me up for more creative work and essentially to make more money.

It's a tool. Like any good tool when used properly it enhances the capabilities of the person wielding the tool.

When used badly by a person that does not know how to use the tool the outcomes can be questionable.

It's that simple really.

This will change in the future as the tool becomes more intelligent and the person behind the tool maybe disappears.