SS and AI. What do we think of this then?

[MistressoftheDarkSide]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/sep/28/social-workers-england-ai-system-magic-notes

Personally I'm a self confessed dinosaur so have huge reservations about the speedy proliferation of AI in every aspect if our lives, not so much due to the technology itself but due to human nature and a growing lack of faith in it as it has been shaped by technology in this brave new world.

So I'd be interested to hear what people think about this innovation.

ML is AI, but AI is not ML. As I said, they are two very different things - or, more accurately, ML is a subset of AI.

Not read the article but as a social worker for adults I would bloody love it if there was an AI solution to writing up all the phonecalls I had made and transferring emails I had sent onto people's records so I didn't spend hours a week summarising or copying and pasting across.

Where appropriate we already use the recording and transcript function in Microsoft Teams to record meetings now. The transcript is a long way off being able to be used as a completed set of minutes but it does mean that accurate and succinct minutes can be produced after the meeting has concluded.

@hatgirl I think though that spending time writing up notes of calls, emails, and meetings, is very important. Sometimes it's the best way to review and think through the information gained and better understand the situation of the family or individual in need.

One of the reasons things are missed or people in need fall through gaps is the lack of holistic help. Holistic - including the need for the social worker to be fully involved in all stages of the work.

Of course that requires better funding and more staff - and better training and management. But that's what is needed. It costs less in the end - because failing services leave people in more need of support and for longer periods.

I don't agree, perhaps it's the type of work I do but I'm literally meaning something that can record that I made a phonecall to X at Y time to say I would be coming to see them on Z date without me having to do it myself. Or automatically copy an email I sent with the persons name in the subject line into their electronic record so that I don't have to save the email first and then manually add it old school style as an attachment into their record.

Which would leave me more time to use my brain space type up better quality holistic assessments and do face to face visits.

I think people should change the way they think about AI. You give it data, and your input is training it.

Incorrect.

LLMs are a form of generative AI. Most were originally trained via machine learning.

Creating them via a form of AI (machine learning) is not the same as them being AI. In their execution, there is no "intelligence" there at all - it's just statistical probabilities.

Yes, strictly speaking, they can be considered AI, but not in the general population's current understanding of it (ie something on the path to AGI). LLMs are about as close to AGI as a fly is to a rocket. Yes, the fly will seemingly make progress towards the eventual goal relative to our viewpoint, but it will never ever get to the moon, and its existence is irrelevant to the process of building something that will.

What I find most scary is that people are treating ChatGPT as an authority when they want to know something.