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 😂

Yes. I wonder if things like this are companies testing the waters to see how stupid we really are:

Unfortunately I think I know the answer.

How did you know it was AI?

Maybe it was a rational well balanced response unlike many MN posters!!! Seriously though I don't know how you know.

Ironically it could be the downfall of SM and open ended Google searches, in that people will get sick of AI generated rubbish and gradually move away from it. Eventually most apps or tools or media whatever would be closed subscription only so a lot less endless mindless scrolling and advertising. That would be no bad thing.

Fwiw I know exactly nothing about AI and am not even on SM so I could be talking through my backside here.

I was thinking about this the other day. I bought an air fryer on Amazon and now everytime I go on it’s telling me about cheap airfryers

wouldn’t a better AI (and human salesman!) focus on trying to sell me the accessories? Or similar products

@EgyptionJackal - Good point. One can imagine that in this context UBI, like the Marshall Plan, would help sustain markets and keep revolution at bay. But I can't see it ever happening.

Quite a few people on this thread seem to have lost their jobs to AI, as have I. It seems like most of us were in the creative industry: writers/editors? So we lose our jobs, the world fills up with AI's unique brand of confident, hallucinatory bland, and when they come to train the next generation of Large Language Models on a vast, human-generated dataset they discover, uh. Goose. Egg. Golden. That would be the ultimate karma.

How did you know it was AI?

Maybe it was a rational well balanced response unlike many MN posters!!! Seriously though I don't know how you know.

There's a distinct style to some posts which simply don't seem like the product of a human typing. I've reported quite a lot now, MNHQ invariably agrees and deletes them.

Yes they do read in quite a robotic way

I imagine life on NBI to be quite similar to 1984!

Please could you add a link?

Please, please can someone clarify do people mean ai driven bots? Because saying AI posting on MN sounds inane.

Humans who build AIs can ALSO be conscious of their biases, and make an effort to train an AI NOT to recreate those biases. And then, once that is done, the AI will act in an unbiased way.

While in real life, we've been sending people to unconcious bias training and workshops on Black History Month for years, and yet, bizarrely, white men still dominate. SOOOOOO weird!?

All feels a bit too black mirror for me.

You seem to be confusing my point. I'm not saying that human-led recruitment is perfect, or that companies typically do it well. I'm also not saying that AI isn't capable of having fewer biases in future. All I'm saying is that for lazy companies to be plugging CVs through AI are potentially not realising that this is by no means an objective review.

Lots of people seem to have the misplaced belief that if something is "digital" it must be better/more accurate, and you see lots of people taking AI output as gospel truth. That's bad enough when it's believing some BS Google summary, but it's really dangerous to know companies are considering it's use in recruitment.

Also, unconscious bias training and black history month wasn't anything I suggested as a solution to this with regards recruitment. Factors like taking out names/genders etc from CVs before passing them for review, having a diverse panel making recruitment decisions, having a process which isn't only focussed on one skillset (I.e., more than just an interview where if you're bad at presenting you've already failed). Is it perfect? No. Is it better than churning CVs through AI and assuming you're getting to the best candidates? Yes. Does everyone take recruitment this seriously? Definitely no. Will AI fix that? Not any time soon!

I'm on the fence. Sometimes, it's garbage in, garbage out, but summarised, and actually clearly wrong. If I ask it to re-write something, it doesn't do it that well. My oddest moment with AI was when I wrote a great review of the McDonalds in Krakow main square on tripadvisor (there is a reason for this, I get that the food is the same world-over😀) and I got a lady responding asking about the accessibility aspects, which I was happy to answer. Then she asked about other attractions in Krakow, giving her particular (quite detailed) circumstances around accessibility, again, I was happy to answer, and even offered my notes by email on the particular facilities and challenges. She did not take me up on the offer, then she asked me if McD does take-away, and I started to smell a rat that I wasn't actually helping a proper person with accessibility issues but I was being "AI'd". My DD had a look at the convo, and said it wasn't a real person and I had definitely been had "bless you mum, I know you like to help". I've gone off AI a bit since then.

I just read this. It's so incredibly sad.

Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?
The mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy says he became obsessed with a chatbot on Character.AI before his death.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html

I'm a university lecturer. We are living out cost-cutting in many of our institutions on an unprecedented scale, and are losing many of the added-extras which used to be provided for our students: among them the proof-reading service on which dyslexic students in particular have relied.

This phenomenon is here. It's going nowhere. What I therefore do is embed it into every module. I teach how to use it as a tool, and apply every critical process to interpreting its results as a student would apply to, for example, a peer-reviewed article. In short, they should treat it with the same suspicion as sites like Wikipedia. A.I. can be used as a form of personal tutor: its strengths are that it's a language-generative model and its use should be viewed in such a light. Therefore: proof-checking, synthesising information, asking it to provide overviews of articles and comparing the summaries with the students' own speed-reading of this information, are all tasks they could ask it to perform. I also teach them to prompt it properly for information: if your prompts are vague then you'll get a vague answer.

I teach that they should conduct their own research and never cede over their thinking processes to a machine. Do that and they become dependent, with few critical faculties of their own. I also show them, during the course of this session, how easy it is for lecturers to spot A.I. generated material. Use it often and you do get a sense of its strengths and pitfalls, its phrasing, vague, generalised summaries of topics, out-of-date materials and inaccurate, sometimes non-existent referencing. Ask it for a 2000 word essay and it will also stop short of any kind of conclusion; sometimes mid-sentence.

In short, I make the process transparent. I'm happy for them to use it as a 'personal tutor', so to speak, but if they attempt to cheat they know people who are experts in their particular academic field will spot it from a mile away. I also use it as a good opportunity to teach research ethics.

I anticipate that as the technology becomes more up-to-date and sophisticated, then cheating will become more difficult to spot. The standard plagiarism software can't detect it: what I hope is that this too will become more sophisticated and eventually be able to flag a machine-generated text.

I also deliberately set assessment briefs that it would be incredibly difficult for A.I. to meet.

brilliant, thank you very much for this reply

I totally get what you mean about AI being everywhere! It's so annoying when your feed is full of those weird fake images. It really does feel like it's taking over sometimes. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

I totally get what you mean! AI showing up everywhere can be a bit much. Especially when it fills your feed with stuff you don't care about. It's good to hear someone else feels the same way.