I have begun relying on AI and I don’t know how I feel about it.

[Tusktusk]

So far this month I have used AI to:

Analyse my colours (thanks MN) and suggest outfits

Create a menu of packed lunches around my dietary requirements and preferences, complete with a shopping list

Plan a holiday itinerary

Save me hours and hours of work and stress by suggesting really useful ways to overcome very particular work difficulties, having been thrown into an out of my comfort zone situation. I have used AI for this on a daily basis this week

Tonight, instead of posting my current family dilemma on mumsnet I chatted about it with Claude. The responses were really good. Wise, thoughtful, non judgemental, practical, understanding… like the best mumsnetters.

Am I starting to rely on it too much?

What have you been using it for?

I recommend Years and Years on Netflix. I think it was on bbc originally. Quite a realistic portrayal of the future decade when it comes to ai and technology. Quite depressing.

I was against AI for a long time, especially as a creative person. I got really annoyed that my boss at my last job was using it to write grant proposals, website text and strategy plans. I do have concerns about the environmental impact too, and how some people use it for even the simplest of things like finding out where the nearest cafe is.

However, I have come around to it a little now after curiosity got the better of me. I had to produce some work quickly and unexpectedly recently and needed summaries of quite complex information. I had AI give me those summaries (fact checking as I went) and it really did save me a ton of time. I wrote the content myself but the summaries and explanations of the concepts was very helpful indeed. Since then I’ve used it to help me devise an exercise plan and create trackers for me, help me research new job roles, and work out a strategy for growing part of my business.

Oh now this I am interested in. Would you mind telling me which AI you're using, please?

I need to write a large document (20K words), and my memory & cognitive problems mean it's frankly beyond my capabilities these days.

I don't want an AI assistant to trawl the web and invent a load of crap. I want it to take a heap of material I've brain-dumped into a document and turn this into something fit for human consumption. Obviously then edited again by me for accuracy.

Ideally I'd prefer to do this offline, for the privacy and GDPR reasons described above. I'm happy to pay for the service with money. Less keen to pay for it by handing over the data.

In the 20s/30s depression there were not plenty of well paid jobs elsewhere. Women in particular held on to those jobs for grim death as the WC men returning to the land “fit for heroes” were unemployed. It was the early ‘00s and post WW2 which saw the problem shift to a shortage of domestic labour.

The point is blue collar workers have been through this already and by and large white collar workers took advantage rather than showing any support - it was progress, they had to suck it up.

Now its white collar workers at risk and blue collar workers (who had to move largely into services) could well be better off in terms of job security but its all doom and gloom and government departments and quangos are needed to find ways to protect jobs and cross train.

I just find it interesting how the attitudes to two distinct periods of job revolution are so different.

So why was 'the servant problem' such an issue in the decades after WWI?

Women had more options open to them. They could work in shops, offices and factories at better pay and hours than they had worked for as domestic staff.

ETA the main cause of unemployment following WWI was WWI.

It was shitty to throw miners on the scrap heap without a plan b then, and it's shitty to throw creatives on the scrap heap without a plan b now.

China knows they can't have a mass of restless unemployed people of the CCP might lose power - over here I'm not sure that the rich billionaires and their shareholders care for the people they impact. and therin lies a problem.

Sceptic though I am, I do have to admit that google maps has changed my life for the better, because I have a truly terrible sense of direction and can get lost anywhere. But maybe I should concentrate on improving my mental muscle to get better at being observant?

Exactly! How do you know Google maps is sending you the right way, the quickest way? How do we know that AI is suggesting healthy meals? How do we know the health advice AI is giving is correct?

Has absolutely changed my life for the better in so many aspects, my business, my eating habits, my anxiety, doubled my income, meal planning, glow up, voucher codes, halves my workload. Game changer.

https://observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/colm-toibin-ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-maybe-thats-good

How do you think AI is going to affect you as a writer?

It’s going to be the end of us all. And maybe that’s good. In other words, it’s very clear that this idea of sensibility, which we go on about a lot – “no machine could ever replace my sensibility, which is so rich, varied, complex, and arising from experience and from history” – that’s all rubbish. You can actually manufacture that.

You can make something like it. But will there not always be that little something that distinguishes it from something written by a human being?

No, that little thing doesn’t exist. And the more material they put into the machines, the more the machines will just learn about what sentences sound like, what rhythm is like. And the novelist can go and do something more useful. I don’t quite know what that is.

You sound very sanguine about it. Is it because you have such a long, varied and interesting creative career in the bag?

Yes, I suppose it’s a lovely idea that you could close the door behind you, and maybe lock it and throw away the key. And the house of fiction is not only empty, it’s been taken over by a corporation. The alarming part is that those gents who seem so filled with hope and offering us such openness, such as Mark Zuckerberg, were not uncomfortable in the White House with the nearest thing we have to a fascist in politics.

why not ask ai how you feel?

Sometime it definitely doesn't! I am embarrassed to say that the other day, the road-sign said right, google maps said left and I went left...

they could both be right. In my rural area Google Maps will often suggest a 'short cut' which saves a minute of time but involves going down a terrifying single track road, when the signposts suggest a different (better) route.

I use ChatGPT for all sorts of things. Most recently it generated me a lovely poster for my tutoring business. 100x better than anything I could have knocked up, and really professional-looking.

I have to respectfully disagree with him.

Consider this:

are you happy giving it your photo/face to help it create deepfakes?

are you happy sharing your personal family information with it?

if your children share their school work with AI for feedback: are you/they happy giving away their intellectual property rights to a machine?

if it’s free, you’re the product.

AI wont replace people. But people who know how to use AI effectively WILL be replacing people who can't or won't.

I am a Comms Director and I don't know any content creators that don't use it.

Ai is getting 'better' at frightening exponential speed. Just watch this (SFW) 1min long video - totally Ai generated. Once you know, you can spot a few giveaways, but on first watch - and if you didn't know it was Ai - you could very easily think it's real.

https://x.com/laszlogaal_/status/1925094336200573225

What AI did you use for your garden?

I used chatGPT

Yes I did it with chatGPT, just uploaded a photo of my garden and asked it to show me what I can do with the space.

I have seen the term techno feudalism bandied around - the owners of the tech will continue to be as rich as Croesus whilst the mass of society will be impoverished. We need democratic control of society and the implications. Reform will just throw us on the pyre of billionaires.

I get where you’re coming from — some AI-generated messages do feel generic or lack a human touch. But I think it depends a lot on how they’re used. AI can be a great tool for speeding things up or getting past writer’s block, but ideally people should personalise the output so it actually reflects their voice. Like any tool, it’s only as good as the effort someone puts into using it well.

The increase in power needed for AI & larger data centres is most definitely a real thing.

Microsoft seem to be going ahead with their leasing of one of the Three Mile Island reactors to have an exclusive source for their new AI data centre.

Small (nuclear) Modular Reactor (SMR) development & research is being bouyed by investment by the big AI & cloud service providers, with Alphabet (Google) and Amazon (for their AWS system) at the forefront together with Microsoft looking beyond just leasing a single reactor in Harrisburg.

I’m pro nuke (reactor, not weapon) so the development of more power plants with big money for zero to low carbon energy investment is win win, but don’t naïve to think that this is just like a fun addendum to helping plan this week’s meals or choosing your colours (whatever that means).

I’m definitely not anti AI but I am cautious. For every piece of information you feed that little AI prompt, you are arming it with that information you have given it. Every question, every fact, every image, every small, almost inconsequential prompt you type is providing a point for that AI to gather data, bank & learn from it.

Obviously, there is a huge potential for security breaching (make sure you have your company’s consent before you start chatting with Claude or ChatGPT at your desk) and a lot of what AI fodder is given back to you is currently utter bollocks.

Until there is a Utopian, god-like AI that is infallible (which is never), use critical thinking before you employ that answer in your work.

And in time there will be deskilling & job losses. I don’t see why or how there won’t be.

No matter what your view though, the humongous AI rhino is barreling towards us, so in our industry, it’s either be trampled by it or train to become the bloody zoo keepers who will wrangle the thing.

Here’s an older article on the whole nuke reactor thing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx25v2d7zexo.amp