To be so sick of AI!

[Missingpate]

It’s everywhere and it’s awful! On a personal level, taking over my FB feed with nonsense, fake images that are just annoying, irritating platitudes… the first thing you get on an internet search is a load of Ai content scraped from all over so you have no idea what you are reading and can’t begin to credit a source if researching etc. it’s basically theft, as I see many are now petitioning to point out.
And it’s terrifying for what it is likely to do to the jobs market and all sorts of other Black Mirror type things my brain can’t fully imagine but I’ve no doubt are coming. Yesterday my boss had an email from a company with an AI plan to do what I do, explaining all the things they could offer. We all had a good chuckle about it because it totally lost all the nuance of the actual role involved but for many this will become reality. It all feels nightmarish quite frankly. I’m sure there are some good things but struggling to see many. Medical ones come to mind, I suppose. But wanted to rant, so ranting 😂

Agree with this. Using ChatGPT to write things doesn’t really give you any understanding of the topic. That’s fine if you already understand it and just need help writing but what if school children all start doing homework with AI instead of reading and thinking about the questions? Surely at some point that will cause a massive problem? AI doesn’t actually understand in the same way as we do and we’re in trouble if we ever forget that.

Also what will happen once there’s so much AI generated content that it’s basically feeding on itself?

I’m a translator so obviously need to think about the future but it’s all moving so quickly that I don’t know if I should retrain and if so, to do what? I actually asked ChatGPT this question and it told me that if I enjoy what I’m doing and earn enough money I should just consider learning to use the new tools so I can offer more services. That’s quite a sensible answer so I think I’ll go with that!

This is not necessarily the case though. The friend who's using AI is entering prompts and telling the AI what to write. AI just structures it, but the meaning is still what the person intended to convey, they will then edit and refine as most AI models are still a little rough around the edges. You used a machine to post your message and here I am scrolling on a machine to read it. People tend to be suspicious of any new technology, it was the same when photography, film or Web 2.0 were invented. AI doesn't worry or confuse me, maybe because I have gone through that 'holy shit' moment when smart phones, Facebook, insta etc became widely used.

I’ve probably read too much dystopian fiction but tech advancement with no thought for unintended consequence is pretty dangerous!!

YABU, Facebook has been shit for a long time and will continue to get shitter AI or not. It's about the company strategic decisions, not the content.

We are starting to use generative AI at work to draft emails, automatically schedule meetings, write presentation automatically, summarise teams meeting notes and actions, analyse documents, screen candidates during recruitment etc.
Copilot in Microsoft can also help individuals with low excel skills work out more complex formulas without having to learn the syntax, advise on reports that could be run, create powerpivot table etc.

There is no doubt it will be a workplace standard in a few years, so rejecting it isn't wise.

That’s fine if you already understand it and just need help writing but what if school children all start doing homework with AI instead of reading and thinking about the questions?

I know an ESL teacher whose students were using AI to do their essays. They didn't even bother to edit the parts where ChatGPT had self-referenced!

The sooner AI wipes out all jobs and we're put on a universal basic income the better

This will only reinforce the class hierarchy, creating an upper class of wealthy AI tech giants and an underclass of depressed, demotivated perma-NEETs. Humans are no different from any other species in our instinct to work towards something fulfilling, to innovate and improve using our own hands or our own brains. The trick would be using AI to overhaul soulless jobs into more rewarding ones, without completely obsoleting the livelihoods of low-skilled workers.

Becoming so reliant on technology that society forgets basic skills would make us one solar flare or power outage away from extinction. Tbh, we're probably already at that point.

The other issue with AI of course is the vast quantities of energy it consumes.

It's not just cold - because of the way AI learns/the algorithms, it's also been shown to be effectively racist. It 100% should not be used for recruitment!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-023-02079-x

That article was published in 2023 and would be based on data that's at least 2 years old if not more. Ai models have come a long way since and are a lot less biased now. The risk of bias was urgently addressed by the larger providers of LLMs, it's much more sanitised now.

Seeing whole groups and pages full of AI pictures of scantily clad women and full of 1000s of men saying "perfect" "who is she she's beautiful", we're doomed.

I hate how AI is used to filter candidates. You have to play a game of keywords in the hope your CV lands in front of an actual human.

The Google AI summary is not worth the reading. For instance, there was a mini kerfuffle on FB recently about some bigwig in the NHS, where people were saying she was not a doctor, but was a GP somehow, and how had this happened.

So I googled her, and yes, this was what the AI summary said.

Looking into it more deeply, it turned out her first name was the same as a GP who also had an entry on a webpage the AI had 'read', so it had conflated the two bios.

The danger is that people read the AI blurb at the top, and make no further investigations. You see it here, on the medical threads too, and that's dangerous already.

As for it being labour-saving and giving us all a life of leisure - yeah, I've been hearing that about technology since the late 1960s, and yet here we all are, working harder and earning less in comparison to our overlords. (Speaking generally of course)

I think it's one of those things where you don't really see it until you see it, and then once you see it, you can't unsee it.

I remember in the run up to the Brexit referendum all I saw on my social media was propaganda and the same 20ish accounts posting the same nonsense over and over again, and I thought, "Wow, how are there so many completely stupid people and why are they all reading off the same script." It wasn't until much later that it clicked and I realised they were all bots.

Na, that's the opposite of what AI can do in candidates screening.
Using key words is what the basic "filtering" functionality of any data management tool does. That's the old way to screen information.
AI can interpret your CV or cover letter to capture transferable skills or experience, it's much better than using keywords.

But of course, aligning the language in a CV to the job application is always a good idea. Chatgpt is great at doing that 😁

I agree with you, I’ve had enough of AI generated images, specially when you see lots of people commenting and asking where a particular photograph was taken. With regards to the search, if you are using Google, you now get the link at the end of each sentence to the page where the quote has been taken from. I only noticed this over the last few days, so I don’t know if it’s a recent change. You can click on the link image at the end 🔗.

Will we get UBI though, or will we all be forced to survive on universal credit? I agree, I think we need UBI at this point but we need a forward thinking, progressive government to implement it. As yet we don't have one.

I thought AI would've taken my job by now to be honest. I don't think it'll be long. AI could do my job easily. It scares me to think about looking for a new job.

I would definitely support that if it could be guaranteed in some way! AI plagiarises and its generative writing cannot be trusted to be accurate.

WriterCam? Vids on YouTube complete with cats sitting on keyboards? Something is urgently needed to fight this digital slavery, which is making copywriters churn out drivel every day to feed algorithms instead of human connections.

I'll look into it if the cat ever gets off the keyboard

I just lost a job because of AI. 😿

Agree! YANBU, OP.

I'm so sorry. I worry about that.

You might notice it on mumsnet. For example someone will post with a bizarre but real issue or event, and a bit later on a similar thread will appear. The initial post won’t be identical, but it will be similar enough for you to think ‘damn I never heard of this happening before and now it’s happening to 2 people’

It’s like very bad photoshop, some don’t see it, others can’t see past it. Right now AI presents itself as fun and quirky, let’s see where we are in 12 months whether fabricated material and fake information starts causing fights, murders and wars.

The other things that bother me regarding technology in general is that whatever we're getting now is about ten or 20 years behind what the military and corporations have brewing. And we are guinea pigs who cannot just uncouple from it all because we are so dependent on it.