to find that ChatGPT is saving me tons of time at work?

[one2one2]

I have so much more work-life balance now thanks to ChatGPT that is making mincemeat of the mundane parts of the job. It will proof read, put together emails, produce critiques, minutes and actions points, analyse finances all in the matter of seconds and much more.

Work was done by 2pm so I had a lovely afternoon in the sun because all my tasks got completed so quickly.

And no, AI can't take over my job completely as it involves critical face to face interaction and other specialist skills which AI cannot do.

Blimey, how the other half live.

I’m reading this whilst sat in my farm truck doing the animals at dusk.

Are you not all worried you won’t have jobs soon? If my staff were finishing at 2pm I’d be amalgamating the jobs really rather pronto!!

I use chatGPT all the time for working on spreadsheets and coding. It’s like a verbose toddler. Super keen to please. Says whatever you want to hear.

so, so, so often wrong. It speaks like it understands things, its language is designed to make you feel like you’re talking to a person. But it’s just NOT, and it just DOESN’T understand. It has no grasp of the purpose or point of things, it’s just good at stringing together statistically likely words.

Again I say this as someone who uses it a lot: it’s really disturbing how often it’s wrong!

well it saves me tons of time, but always other stuff to do.
Love Fathom AI for minute taking.

Overheard my line manager saying "No, no one in the organisation uses AI" the other week, had to laugh.

And the key message in every paragraph is that it should be used "wisely" - except it won't be and we already have evidence of this.

Yup, yet another example of it not being used "wisely".

It's annoying. I tend to bash out very wordy emails, and then I go back and cut and edit them for brevity, as I know my colleagues are too busy to read long emails.

Why would someone want to make an email longer and waste people's time? To sound clever/professional? I despair.

I use AI to tidy up code or scripts for me, I'll use it when I'm out and about and need to have a 'professional' response to an email, whilst I'm actually sitting by the sea having a pint and doing things!
It isn't actually going to take jobs away, it will just take the boring bits of the job and make them easier.
It's up to companies and individuals to choose how to interact/use/adopt these new technologies - if I'm up early and doing a bit of a breakfast run, and I get a selection of pastries from M&S or Waitrose, I'm not using the self checkout, I can't remember if Rosie from accounts wanted a croissant or a pain au chocolat this morning, let alone Bill from HR wanting that apricot thing if you are in M&S or the hazelnut thing if in Waitrose, so I go to the checkout with a person.
It is how you use things and understand their flaws, an awful lot of my job is knowing what 'not' to do, rather than what to do.

Word doesn't produce the minutes and action points of meetings.

No I am not worried. I have a business also that cannot be done by AI.

Farming is significantly different to my job!

AI can’t proofread well. Always check your own work.

bizarrely enough, with robotics, gps,upto the minute weather reports and automation, farming (not all of it), but the mundane, the huge argi brigade lot, are an ideal example of AI potentially being successful, it could monitor the soil moisture, and adjust accordingly, monitor the waste from the animals and point out potential issues etc..,
Yes it's not the UK example of a farmer, but in a vast county size grain field.....

There are some very limited aspects of my job that it could do, but I am very mindful of the catastrophic environmental cost and so I don't consider it worth it.

This post sounds AI written, so I see how you get away with it.

Let OP enjoy her time in the sun.
She’ll also really enjoy services she thought were being produced by humans with experience and qualifications. Things like medical diagnoses and legal documentation.
Hey it’s all good right 👍

In another case, which ended in April, a lawyer for a man suing his local council said she could not explain where a series of non-existent cases in the arguments had come from.

That is worrying. How did the courts discover that the cases used in the argument were non-existent?

It’s a large language model. Don’t trust the proof reading.

No wonder so many employers are trying to get their employees back in to the ofice. 🙄 FFS!

This kind of thread does NOT do people who work from home any favours.

How does it help with coding? Do you say "here's a customer's requirements, write me some code that does that" and a minute later a load of code is spat out all fully quality controlled and tested? I'm genuinely curious as my daughter wants to get into coding.

Yeah, sure you do. And even if you don't, your personal input is still so important that you won't be made redundant. Enjoy!

again, if you are looking at a serious of cells under a microscope attempting to find something odd, AI/computer tech is better at finding something which isn't right than a human. We get tired, so looking at 1000 samples the human ability drops towards the middle, then picks up towards the end.

The vast majority of the posts here are stating that it is useful, when you know how to use it. A car is useful, but if you have no fuel it cant do anything.

It is another tool which depending upon the user could be extremely useful, if when I'm in the allotment I am cutting timber to make a raised bed, I get the circular saw out, if I'm hanging a door and making the hinges sit flush, it's hammer and chisel.

Only a bad workman blames his tools.

It just scrapes other people’s work together. The world is going to become a really boring place with this new fad for what is essentially copy and pasting.

You have a good work life balance now, but what job will you be doing once all the office type jobs are being done by glorified search engines? You will have to do something physical as physical robots aren’t as advanced yet or maybe there will be a lot of fact checking jobs.

In theory, as it learns/steals from others, a group like anonymous could write a million fake internet articles and suddenly everything ChatGPT says will be less than unless.

Thinking for ourselves and learning new things has been proven to reduce the risk of degenerative brain conditions. Is this new craze going to increase these conditions ?

There were always text templates and email templates but most people didn’t use them because it’s so obvious when you get a generic response. I get too embarrassed to use the suggested birthday messages on Facebook. I just see the whole thing as quite cringe.

It's always been that way, first it was Dorr E. Felt (what a name) with the comptometer back in 1887, dubbed the "machine gun of the office" it made thousands upon thousands of clerks redundant by making addition fast, very fast. Then in 1890 Herman Hollerith started making tabulating machines for calculating statistical data and founded IBM in 1924, from those early days of office equipment pioneers, to todays AI the goal of those who make office equipment and systems is to remove humans which cost money and can make errors.

Until recently there had to be some operators to drive the things, but those days are over and AI is making gigantic steps to take over from the operator.

Look at distribution warehouses, a huge facility can be operated by 6 or 8 staff whose job it is to sort things out when the automation occasionally stops working or lobs a parcel on the floor.

If you work in an office the original "machine gun of the office's" great great grandkids are coming for your jobs.

Also, ChatGPT and similar should be made to quote all its sources at the end of its ‘work’ and all those who use it should be made to quote the original author too.

they are made of a myriad of sources, chucked in a blender and thrown out. If you only think that AI is used for saying something, you don't understand the full purpose of AI, think of it as all the under grads getting together and helping each other out for their finals.
If you don't use it correctly its blooming obvious it's AI generated, it's like watching the latest James Bond film and saying that doesn't happen in real life......

This is really interesting.

As an experiment I’ve been sampling AI stories recently. Very quickly you pick up the style - the narrative formulae, the glib insights, and the laboured, slightly comic metaphors. It must be absolutely infuriating to have those landing on your desk.

It’s not necessarily worse than Barbara Cartland though.