What am I missing with AI hype?

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ExileNorth@reddit

I personally use LLM's (Gemini is my go-to) as personal tutors and researchers. I can ask it to teach me about a subject and it just does it. It's 100% patient, has no time constraints, has access to the entire internet to source information, can provide links to youtube videos for tutorials etc.

I learned how to build complex data models in excel with powerquery and m code purely from Gemini. I also used it to learn how to service my car and change the brake disks and pads from a complete novice starting point. There's a couple of examples.

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RecentTwo544@reddit

Can you give an example of a subject?

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onionsareawful@reddit

Just about anything. Modern AIs are quite intelligent with reasoning turned on and access to the internet.

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frogfoot420@reddit

I will get downvoted, but I’m getting this out there.

I think we should be concerned given how poor the UKs productivity is. People love to say AI can’t do x and y, and whilst true - that’s typically from a place where productivity is high and they are highly specialised. This isn’t the case for a good chunk of British business.

There’s many easy gains to be had, and it will just lead to eventual job cuts.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

People love to say AI can’t do x and y, and whilst true - that’s typically from a place where productivity is high and they are highly specialised

Highly specialised like knowing not to eat rocks, or count the number of r's in the word strawberry?

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onionsareawful@reddit

highly specialised like finding thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in critical software?

https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

It's been an uphill battle for me to prove to my company that we need to adopt AI workflows or die.

It took me recreating our product in a different set of frameworks and programming languages over 4 days for them to get it.

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pajamakitten@reddit

That relies on British businesses being productive in areas they are not using it too though. We might be a low productivity country, however I do not think AI is the panacea a lot of companies need.

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saltlampsandphotos@reddit

I'm see both points. I'm in a role where AI could do it, if policy and a legal framework changed. As it stands what I do must be assessed by a person.

However I see the numbers in terms of how unproductive we are. Obviously not sustainable.

But, I just worry. I can't see a world in which AI is handily embraced, without unending the social fabric of our country, and the massive 3rd / 4th order consequences it'll have on the economy.

It's the usual talking point. There can only be so many self-employed manual workers. What happens to those short, mid and long term who are surplus?

Cause I don't see a automated robotic utopia where we have near infinite resources and we just spend our days walking amd painting.

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rohithimself@reddit

A scientist friend of mine thinks he has been able to find a new proof to a theorem by getting some inputs from AI. Things are coming.. right now our brain is what is limiting it. Think of now as the 1995 of software industry. Wait 4 years and there will be Google.

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zephyrmox@reddit

I genuinely think that people do not understand the acceleration effect it has code wise. Things that used to take me a day can be done in 10mins.

As a solo dev I can spend my time working on the stuff that's actually important as opposed to building boilerplate scaffolding. My output of genuinely useful stuff has increased by a huge factor in the past few months.

Most people will only have used the free model in ChatGPT - the top end ones are really a different league.

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greengrayclouds@reddit

My output of genuinely useful stuff has increased by a huge factor in the past few months

it's going to drop for sure. i feel lucky to have had that career when i did, i could have kept it for 5 more years into my sixties if i'd wanted (especially looking after legacy bases) and health allowed but it very much looks like opportunities will dry up.

I am glad my son didn't chose this route and went down the disease research scientist route honestly. he uses code tools to help analyse data, these tools just take away a part of the job that otherwise drains his time.

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rossdrew@reddit

Until that code needs cleaned up. If I can be sure devs will do anything, it’s misuse tools

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JeffSergeant@reddit

I don't know about that, most software companies have a massive backlog, and new features always mean MORE bugs, and more new feature requests. The good companies will keep people on an accelerate their delivery massively.

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

Already happening.

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BasedRedditor543@reddit

Yeah it’s a problem not really sure on the solution tho like people are anti ai because of it but like we can’t just artificially hold back inevitable technology advances just to keep people in otherwise obsolete jobs

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zephyrmox@reddit

If not, does this not mean things have become much more productive with much less need for employees?

For the majority of software engineers doing not novel things? yes, absolutely.

Large companies will lag behind on this by years due to compliance and other fears - small agile developers will eat their lunch. You are going to see big players slowly get unseated by small scrappy startups willing to leverage AI fully.

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GordonLivingstone@reddit

If you are writing code for (eg) flight management systems, self driving cars etc, you are still going to need all the requirements traceability, functional testing and proof of compliance with all relevant standards. That will need more than a sanity check on AI output. (I'm not a software developer but did work on engineering management in that kind of field. Getting the documentation right was a much bigger job than getting working code.)

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AgeingChopper@reddit

a former colleague has been doing this. it's agile for sure. I was looking at some of the code last autumn.. what a mess that was but it didn't matter to him as it was all new and experimental.

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zephyrmox@reddit

This stuff is moving very quickly - the quality of code now is a diff league. But yes, it can be bad, and very messy at times - you have to give strong guidelines and really push it to optimise at times.

For a long time Claude for example had a tendency to hardcode values as fallbacks rather than failing - I now have a system prompt which instructs it NEVER to do this in my codebase.

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AgeingChopper@reddit

no doubt. i retired last autumn. it'll race away. it'll keep learning on improving data sets, no longer scraping stack overflow all the time lol.

he was very keen on Claude, saw it as the future.

me, i think i'd reached the point where i was too old for it honestly. i'd been doing it for 37 years and was looking at retiring in a couple of years but my health forced that up a couple of years. I feel like this stuff is for a new generation, I'm happy to retire with my handcrafted preference and. after something like 45 years since first learning to program , fully leave it behind. I'm enjoying a more analogue world now with my instruments and my old records.

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

no doubt. i retired last autumn. it'll race away. it'll keep learning on improving data sets, no longer scraping stack overflow all the time lol.

I think we're at the self improvement loop at this point. It's using its own code it writes as training data. If the user doesn't like it or alters it, it was bad training data. If the user accepted it as is, it's good training data. Now there's thousands upon thousands of developers helping to train the AI to replace them.

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AgeingChopper@reddit

yes, that is a sad reality. true.

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

Claude still loves an N+1 query lol.

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

You are going to see big players slowly get unseated by small scrappy startups willing to leverage AI fully.

The differentiator for SaaS will be marketing budget and support staff budget. The tech is now cheap, and almost anything can be copied with ease.

A scrappy start up offering bargain basement prices will likely be skimping on support staff and that's noticable to the consumer.

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luckless666@reddit

A scrappy start up won’t necessarily offer lower prices; the successful ones will be much more agile at reacting to customer requests and shipping new features

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

That's a good point.

We're not all at huge risk of AI though. Software development is ironically ripe for displacement because it's literally what AI should be best at.

Possibly but the truth is that with the massive increase in productivity, every company is going to work much faster and aim much higher.

I work in flood forecasting and I've immediately have seen massive improvements in the way we do things. Obtaining live data to validate our models, automating data analysis on terabytes of data, spinning up ECS instances to perform small tasks and modifying code that previously had hard coded parameters to work on other projects in hours rather than months is literally a game changer.

A lot of work is simply 'joining up the dots' and AI can help tremendously with that.

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Ballbag94@reddit

Not if you keep your productivity increase quiet and take the time back then it's still the same amount of people doing the same amound of work

All that matters is an employer is happy with the work produced

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the-cock-slap-phenom@reddit

Exactly, OP just says:

I get the fact it can compile code easier for software engineers, debug etc

But I don’t think they do get it. You can’t just dismiss that with a single sentence saying “I get it”.

Do they truly get the fact that this is potentially saving many, many man hours of a highly paid profession, and the benefits this could have for businesses?

And yet they don’t see the value of that? Because it’s not flashy enough with voice assistants?

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Redditors are saying AI is rubbish, so it is, OK?

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luckless666@reddit

Yeah I use it to create mocks up in a minute where I used to have to fiddle around with existing assets or get the art department to create something - massive time saver

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slade364@reddit

Legislation is the barrier to self driving cars really, not the tech.

They're on European roads in low volume, I expect autonomous taxis will be commonplace within a decade and once legislators catch up.

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TheOrchidsAreAlright@reddit

But a lot of code is being written with AI every day, and it's accelerating.

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SugarpillCovers@reddit

There’s been a lot of reporting on how bad AI-generated code has caused a number of outages and security issues too. While I’m sure it’s a useful tool, you still need people checking the output for accuracy, as, just like when you Google or ask a chatbot something, half the time it’s fabricated or misquoted whatever evidence is being presented.

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vinyljunkie1245@reddit

There was also the Amazon Kiro incident where the Devs let Kiro manage an update. It decided not to update and instead delete everything and rebuild it causing a 13 hour AWS outage

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/ai-code-wreaked-havoc-with-amazon-outage-and-now-the-company-is-making-tight-rules/

This would probably have been avoided with human oversight but as companies push their employees towards using AI/LLMs it will likely happen again a few times

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veodin@reddit

Issues like what are being reported are avoidable with good development practices. A good development workflow, even without AI, should always have humans reviewing code before it enters a production system.

Slop will continue to be a problem, but if a large company releases bad AI written code that is a failure of the organisation and not AI. Human developers make similar mistakes every day.

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Language and context dependent. I'm working with complex SQL and heaps of Python scripts within data engineering.

Some of the Claude outputs are laughably bad, but juniors trust them because the scripts run. I've been busier fixing other peoples (AI output) mistakes than being productive.

Asoxus@reddit

Try Claude Code. It's built for coding unlike GPT.

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It's massively freed up my time to do useful work, too.

I use it to write a lot of my documentation these days, whether it's code comments or actual summary documents for analysis work.

I still have to read what it generates to check for mistakes, but I've always had to do that, so I still save hours every week.

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172116@reddit

>It's massively freed up my time to do useful work, too.

I'm in a totally different field, but I recently used copilot to do the minutes for a workshop I hosted, and it was incredible - I'll need to do some finessing before circulation, but no more than I would need to if I'd had an inexperienced junior staff member there taking notes (which I wasn't going to get with our staffing position!), so it has basically freed up half a day of my time to do work that actually requires my involvement.

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Appropriate-Falcon75@reddit

I would say that coding wise, it is like a junior developer who has read all the textbooks.

Very useful for doing simple things (and can do them unaided)
Can do harder things with a bit of help
Makes some mistakes, so their work needs checking
Misses some important bits (like source control, tests etc), but can add it if asked
Always aims to please and so will make up an answer that it sounds right if it doesn't know it.

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Steppy20@reddit

As a mid-level dev I also use it for identifying if there's a different way of doing what I'm trying to do. Sometimes the way it suggests is nice and neat, and sometimes it's a complete mess and changes the actual logic so you need to ignore it.

But it's really good at writing bulk unit tests for line coverage metrics. It won't get them 100% right but it'll be like 85% of the way there which massively speeds up my workflow.

It was only a couple of years ago where the Copilot I had access to couldn't even do that and I'd take longer fixing it than it saved due to complex business logic.

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slade364@reddit

As someone who's not a developer, I've used it for various Python scripts and VBA which have saved me a lot of time.

I imagine it'll continue to get better, which may be a concern for devs.

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TheBestBigAl@reddit

It's like a junior developer who has read all the textbooks, and then smoked some meth.

It does all that you've described above at a tremendous speed, but also sometimes churns out nonsense.

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jackboy900@reddit

but no more than I would need to if I'd had an inexperienced junior staff member there taking notes

That's the big thing. If you trust them as an authority they have a lot of issues, you can't let them loose, but they're very good at being as competent as a junior employee at a lot of things and that can improve the productivity of a competent user massively.

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

I kid you not... Co Pilot is genuinely shit compared to the cutting edge (Claude Code)

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Admirable-Ask-3017@reddit

If I read chatgpt produced documentation in a job I will find out who had used it and make a mental note never to rely on them for anything, as they can't even use their own brain

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Worth_Gap4226@reddit

I'd also add that a lot of people fail to understand the differences between actual AI and LLMs.

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There's a neat company called Thrive Bioscience that's doing some neat stuff around that.

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Fellstorm_1991@reddit

I've heard of them, they use high content imaging with some very cool microscope techniques. My group focuses on RNA sequencing as our readout.

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AshaNyx@reddit

Theoretically if it was accurate enough you could still use LLMs to do some of the work with gene comparisons (given it's just comparing bases).

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Fellstorm_1991@reddit

We have looked at that. Unfortunately biological systems are incredibly complex and it requires a bespoke solution, particularly when looking at pertubations to the in silico model.

It would be nice if we could just use existing systems retrained on biological data, as it would have saved a lot of time and effort!

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AshaNyx@reddit

I would have expected it to do the very simple stuff, but for most that it's like inventing the wheel. Like why use chat gpt when you have things like blast.

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_Adam_M_@reddit

There are people out there thinking that you can just cure cancer with a few LLM prompts

Almost.

https://news.unsw.edu.au/en/paul-is-using-ai-to-fight-his-dogs-incurable-cancer

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TonyBlairsDildo@reddit

you can just cure cancer with a few LLM prompts

Pretty much, yeah.

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TheTjalian@reddit

You make a convincing argument, u/TonyBlairsDildo

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El_Spanberger@reddit

They might not be far off. Read about a guy who used ChatGPT + DNA seq to sequence his dog's cancer and develop a working therapeutic. No reason why the same thing wouldn't work on humans.

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jeramyfromthefuture@reddit

AI is now a marketing term , it original meant a system that learns and mimics human intelligence what we have now is a librarian who knows all the books in the library but can't actual read a book in the sense of understanding , learning and developing because of the action.

Modern "AI" is just fancy search with a tendency to give a different answer every time its asked a question.

It can "create" code by pasting snippets from examples found on the web , remove the license and then regurgitate this code with no care , see "iseven" examples , where the AI will use a example which demonstrates recursion in a java dev book , instead of the standard 1 line modulus equation.

If you do any critical research on this stuff it all dies on its ass.

Really the question now is , how long are we going to waste our time before we learn that LLM's are not worthwhile for real AI development.

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this_is_theone@reddit

> AI is now a marketing term , it original meant a system that learns and mimics human intelligence

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zephyrmox@reddit

You have to check stuff, sure. But I had to check stuff I wrote before. My code had bugs, this code has bugs. There's a lot you can do to make it a lot more reliable if you are willing (aggressive unit tests, and cross checking with another model - I use OpenAI Codex to cross check code that Claude writes, generally).

It is not 'a bit of time' - my output is at least 3x more than it used to be, probably often more, and I'm nowhere near the frontier using multiple agents, etc.

The risks depend a lot on what you are working on. If it's like, health care systems? yeah AI code without huge amounts of manual review isn't going to happen. If I'm building internal systems for reporting and the like (which a huge portion of software is) - I can run that risk more.

As with everything, there's a trade off - but if a dev is saying it's saving them zero time due to 'not trusting it' - my view is they are either doing something very wrong, are not willing to put in the work to optimise it, or work on something very 'critical' where bugs are NOT acceptable.

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Grimdotdotdot@reddit

I'm in the same field as you, and seeing the same sort of results. I don't have your long-term confidence, though. You say you're getting around 3x the output - that right there could be two of your colleagues that are no longer needed.

It depends on the priorities of the company.

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Asoxus@reddit

It depends. If you just slog through tasks without thinking about them, fixing or changing one thing after another, sure, the AI tools could replace you.

If the tasks get a bit deeper or need proper planning or oversight, then they need their hands held by someone who knows what the output should look like - a dev.

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MarmiteSoldier@reddit

Yeah, I literally get to work - instruct one agent to write me a series of scripts, another to write documentation, then another reviews the work. They all do that work in unison while I sit there twiddling my thumbs. Then I review the work, more often than not, I have to make edits but it’s pretty mind blowing.

I think there will come a time when the output will just be deemed good enough and companies will just save money and cut out the human-in-the-loop part.

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lankymjc@reddit

Corridor Crew (special effects artists and movie makers on YouTube) made an AI to do the boring bits of green screen work for them, giving them more time to do the actual art of CGI.

This is how AI is supposed to be involved in art, not as the full replacement of artists that the big companies are pushing for.

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stoneharry@reddit

It was a neural network, not AI. A bit different but based in the same roots. Neural networks have been around for decades upon decades.

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51onions@reddit

Even before AI, I could do scaffolding with things like angular cli, dotnet cli, or whatever your equivalent is. Boiler plate wasn't usually an issue with appropriate tooling.

I won't deny that the AI is extremely useful though. It will probably take my job some day, but for now it's pretty sweet.

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zephyrmox@reddit

It's not even close to the same as frameworks.

Say I want to build a report with graphs, charts, tables. The value I add is knowing how to pull that data, construct the calculations, show what is valuable for the business. I can plan that all, even hand write some of the calcs if my instructions to AI are not translated into code themselves.

But then I ask for it to build the report. I give it a crudely drawn graph in paint, I give examples. In mins I have rich, HTML / pdf / email output in the format I want. I have zero need to learn any bullshit graphing syntax (looking at you ggplot / matplotlib), zero need to faff with fonts, renderers, etc. I just type and explain, iterating in mins.

A full service scheduling app, tied into Freshdesk to pull information on ickets for assets as well as allowing report creation, engineer task assignments, automated alerts for when jobs are assigned, time logging etc

A full Purchasing dashboarfd where we can see trends on quality issues, scrap and lost locations, high/low performing suppliers etc

A financial reporting program using python to generate reports for finance

a BOM comparison tool that can be used to equate a BOM in Autodesk Vault to the one in our MRP system so we can automate moving a design from dev into production

.... there are about 10 others that are small time apps and about 20 more I have in development.

Each of these was WELL beyond my palty coding skills (I can read python fine but struggle with writing it. My brain just isnt logical enough).

I understand the frustrations for other tasks. I asked it to create a full guide on how to find, track, intercept and target ships in a game called Uboat and the guff it output was terrible...BUT for coding, it is phenomenal. It's like having a £70k software developer on my shoulder 24/7

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Asoxus@reddit

The thing is where we originally could build all those systems, they would take a team a few months, or a solo dev a bit longer. Now Claude can smash out one of those tasks in a few hours, and after iterating a few times, go to market with full marketing strategies, seo plans, the whole 9 yards.

I see a lot of people often watering it down, either because they don't know enough about the tooling, or something else?

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apple_kicks@reddit

Code wise its good at simple things. But you will want to double check how efficient the code is and you’ll spend more time debugging if something breaks and ai can’t fix it. Because you won’t intimately know the code that well

That's what these LLMs like Claude are enabling though. Imagine how quickly it is advancing, and how that can be applied to products like the Neo robot or the SpaceX one. Development of those will come on massively the more AI agents are able to iterate on their coding.

Now if we could just get full self drive approved in the UK, the robots might have a chance...

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DootLord@reddit

I wish I could do this. There's a line between vibe coding crap and agent assisted coded to get what I want faster. We need things far too consistent at my place so for the sake of a bit better readability we are taking many times longer to get stuff out the door.

It's exhausting to hear and then get reprimanded on how we're not outputting enough...

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Empty_Allocution@reddit

Just commented something similar. It is the best use I've found for it.

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I am someone who knows a little bit about coding, and a lot about tech. AI is a total force multiplier. I (for the most part) know bad code when I see it, I know when a shit framework or library is being suggested, I know what kind of security needs to be in place on S3 buckets, or WAFs, secret managers, etc. I know a little about a lot, but not enough to make something of worth on my own.

Until Claude Code, that is..

I'm basically a one man dev team now. I've launched my first solo project (and it has customers, albeit not paying and I'm going to have to shelves it), and I'm currently working on my next project.

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The most noticeable outcome for people has been the endless proliferation of slop. Low quality writing, low quality research and low quality image-generation.

From the beginning of pop-up ads (actually, probably automated phone diallers), it seems like we're in a sort of arms race of having rubbish forced at us at a scale humans can't replicate - and having to find ways to detect and resist it. I've heard from people in recruitment, for example, that AI job applications have meant they receive endless, pointless, useless applications for every role - and now talk about using AI to read them and filter them out.

I genuinely hope the uses in programming and automation aren't overhyped.

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Is the output evidenced though? Can you turn around point a finger and say, this is where we are failing because of redundancies? I think that is the bit that most companies haven't hit yet

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MangoonianLord@reddit

Staff have pointed to the difficulties caused by redundancies but management have fingers in their ears.

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bow_down_whelp@reddit

Aye. It needs to go on some formal report, brought to the board and so on. The difficulties can't come in the from "this is making my job shit", it would have to be evidenced loss

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Foggyslaps@reddit

That will come in time. Legal contracts written by AI, advertising deals, inconsistencies, coding that needs fixing and breaks 400 other things etc, I think it's inevitable

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a period coming of AI regret

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Why? If handled properly, AI and Automations can handle SEO, Marketing, Customer service, to name a few roles that would have been made redundant there.

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SilverstoneMonzaSpa@reddit

My company has not hired for replacements at admin level due to LLMs and honestly, I've not noticed the difference. We used to have six admin staff who would take notes in meetings, write up things etc... general admin tasks.

As two have moved on since LLMs because more adopted, the three remaining easily cover all the work with assistance of LLMs to the point that the quality is higher (better notes, nothing missed etc) and I'm pretty sure it'll get to the point where we need one or possibly two to cover that five or six would have in 2022.

It has already replaced two people's roles in my tiny consultancy.

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apple_kicks@reddit

It creates new jobs verifying the ai didn’t hallucinate enough to be a embarrassment or problem. Depends how much companies will cut wages to these jobs vs people doing it manually. Imo thats not a threat because i think ai to humans verifying slows down productivity and ups electricity bills

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i-am-a-passenger@reddit

You don’t need to create new jobs to do that, companies generally already have this process in place to verify whether their human employees are “hallucinating”.

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roboticlee@reddit

People thought we’d have flying transportation and all sorts..

AI will help us achieve this in short time. It's on its way.

AI has already disrupted all markets from jobs to financial. It is not a case of when is AI coming for our jobs, it is already conquering our world. I see it as a net benefit provided governments step out of the way and we all get to enjoy the freedoms AI will bestow upon us such as the freedom to choose to work or not while still enjoying every luxury imaginable.

Alas, governments are already stepping up measures of control to keep us from enjoying the fruits of AI, robotics and automation. Bureaucrats are afraid. Do not allow them to project their fears onto wider society.

How is it "ravaging" marketing?

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

Well the arse fell out of the marketing job market, coincidentally around the same time the LLMs got competent. I don't believe in coincidences.

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Asoxus@reddit

> AI isn't remotely capable of replacing them

Like who? AI will come for a large portion of the workforce in the next 10-20 years. Accountants. SEO. Marketing. Checkouts. Shelf stacking. It will all be replaced by cheap robotic labour or automated processes on computers.

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RecentTwo544@reddit

AI has been capable of replacing checkout workers and shelf stackers for decades. We've had robots in car factories and warehouses since the 1980s.

Self service checkouts have been a thing for 20 years.

There are other reasons we don't replace humans with this technology despite it being around for decades.

Accountants have been using AI since Excel was launched in 1985 (and I assume there was other software that pre-dated it) and again good reasons we've never let software go it alone in those 40 years.

SEO is kind of no longer a specific job role.

The idea it can replace marketing roles is laughable, that did give me a good chuckle.

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Asoxus@reddit

Chuckle away. Come back to this comment in 10 years.

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RecentTwo544@reddit

"AI" as people are currently calling AI has been around for getting on for 10 years already and as its core level is no closer to taking jobs than when it was invented.

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Exasperant@reddit

In the arts, the one area of life that absolutely should rely on human creativty and experience, it's already being used to replace artists, musicians, singers, voice actors, even live action actors. It's being used for lighting, sound, editing.

The idea it's a glorious new dawn for humanity because it allows us to cheap out on expressions of being human is some weapons grade doublethink bullshit, just as is seeing people already on the precipice of being made obsolete by it embracing and praising its ability to reduce the amound of effort they need to put into their desk job.

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Asoxus@reddit

Cheap out? There are people that could never afford custom songs, paintings, stories, whatever, that now have access to let their imaginations run wild. I think that's a win.

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Remote_Development13@reddit

I would agree with this, it's quite poorly understood across the population (myself very much included). You seem to have a very optimistic/accelerationist perspective and then an incredibly pessimistic view. We could do with a little more nuance in thr discussion

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RecentTwo544@reddit

You seem to have a very optimistic/accelerationist perspective and then an incredibly pessimistic view.

This confuses the shit out of people all the time. I don't see why, my views seem quite sensible and should surely be the default.

It's because I want AI to be as good as people are suggesting it is/will be, and am angry that it isn't.

Now I'm REALLY angry because the price of computer components/storage is either through the roof or they're simply not available, because of this utter shit.

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Remote_Development13@reddit

Sorry, I think you may have misunderstood - I was referring to the fact that across the population, there appears to be an incredibly optimistic view on one side, an incredibly negative one on the other, and little nuance in between

I wasnt making any comment on your personal view

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RecentTwo544@reddit

Oh my apologies, I thought when you said "you seem to have" you meant me specifically.

But actually it still stacks up because I have both, and this should be the default view.

People should be optimistic that it could be good (because one day it will be, might be hundreds or even thousands of years off yet mind) and pessimistic because at present it doesn't work properly.

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redditmember192837@reddit

Why would anyone want it to be good? What good can it possibly do for our lives?

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Remote_Development13@reddit

Sorry, I think you may have misunderstood - I was referring to the fact that across the population, there appears to be an incredibly optimistic view on one side, an incredibly negative one on the other, and little nuance in between

I wasnt making any comment on your personal viewq

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anabsentfriend@reddit

AI will definitely affect my job, and for the better I think. I hope they crack on and get it integrated with our systems ASAP. My job is in the field of structural surveying and assessing deterioration over time.

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doctorace@reddit

My livelihood is under threat because of the global economic downturn. AI is just C-levels putting a positive spin on massively cutting headcount.

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_Odaeus_@reddit

Also anyone who even slightly thinks about the stupendous energy use going into it, or the centralisation of power it brings to a few US companies, or the detrimental economic effects of a massive circular investment bubble and the scarcity of memory, or perhaps the deskilling of a workforce now in order to extract rent later when everyone is dependent on these products. Could be one of those too, just saying...

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Asoxus@reddit

Or the fact that when properly driven, it is able to accelerate the average persons workflow by tenfold, rendering entire projects that would have otherwise taken weeks or months, in hours.

It's enabling people to create who otherwise wouldn't be able to. Children are able to generate specific stories in minutes, and generate images to go with each page near instantly. Elderly or lonely people are able to have conversations with characters that get more realistic every day.

Energy use wouldn't be an issue if people stopped objecting to wind farms, nuclear power stations, and tidal energy farms. But this is britain. Not in my back yard.

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irrelevantusername45@reddit

Children are able to generate specific stories in minutes, and generate images to go with each page near instantly.

Why on earth would you want that?? Children should use their own imagination for stories, it’s one thing that adds to brain development. It’s really really important that children don’t grow up using AI for everything otherwise we’ll see massive cognitive decline in the next few generations.

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Asoxus@reddit

My daughter has been entering writing competitions with her own stories - not generating them. She's able to illustrate what she writes by sketching out her idea and then having Gemini finish it off.

Professional levels of detail for her book, instantly.

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irrelevantusername45@reddit

To me this is bad parenting and I'm sorry to hear this. Learning to write is really important for neural development. By skipping steps and getting a computer to finish it off, you're only stifling her and making her dependent on the tool. Do you also let her cut corners in PE?

With that said, teaching a child how to use AI effectively is certainly a good thing, but you need to be careful not to harm their development. Creative writing is IMO one of the last things you should be automating like this.

One of my biggest regrets is not getting more used to handwriting (Because computers/typing were becoming so much more common in school when I was growing up) and now there are plenty of studies showing how handwriting is much better for your brain/memory than typing. I'm slow and sloppy with handwriting and it's something I keep meaning to improve.

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pintsized_baepsae@reddit

It's enabling people to create who otherwise wouldn't be able to. Children are able to generate specific stories in minutes, and generate images to go with each page near instantly. Elderly or lonely people are able to have conversations with characters that get more realistic every day.

Except prompting is not creation - it's ripping off other people's work while stunting your own creativity and taking the chance to grow away from you - and these 'conversations with characters' are a way to make people wholly dependant on the AI, rather than looking at and treating the root cause of their loneliness.

Children are creative enough to create stories and draw pictures without using AI. They've done it for decades, and playing and being creative REALLY isn't something that needs any level of automation. What, do you want to turn a profit with little Timmy's book??

The issue is that there's a risk of 'failure' attached - and that's what people, ESPECIALLY adults, are afraid of or struggle to accept. Andbfailure is a very flexible term here, because essentially it means 'it didn't come out as I wanted'... Which is gutting in the moment (as every creative will be able to attest to), but is an opportunity for growth and artistic development.

AI is instant gratification. The absolute bottom-ladder fast food kind of 'art'. If it weren't, AI 'artists' wouldn't need to work so hard to convince people that hey!! It's good!!

It it was good and had any merit, the pro-AI crowd wouldn't be so loudly against labelling something as created with AI. The fact that they are - because they know people don't want it - speaks volumes.

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Asoxus@reddit

AI artists aren't trying to convince people that what it makes is good. 40% of newly uploaded songs to spotify are entirely AI and the average person cannot tell the difference.

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luckless666@reddit

I have to admit its killer app for me is how it’s increased my ability to procrastinate tenfold. I now have a full recommendation for an investment plan, mock ups of a self build mansion, short lists of smart home tech and companies to install it, etc for when I almost certainly win the lottery.

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Morganx27@reddit

Children were already able to generate pictures and images, it's called having a pencil and an imagination. I "generated" stories and pictures all the time when I was a child, I spent time doing it, practised my craft and got good at it. When people have been prompting up stories for 10, 20, 30 years, they still won't be any better at it than when they started.

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Grimdotdotdot@reddit

Also anyone who even slightly thinks about the stupendous energy use going into it

Everyone keeps parroting the energy usage stuff, but it doesn't really use that much energy.

I'm far more cross about what it's doing to RAM prices.

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_Odaeus_@reddit

Training runs continuously for weeks across giant compute clusters. Companies are literally attaching gas turbines to their data centres because the grid is insufficient and others have talked about needing more nuclear reactors.

Not sure how much energy you think is "not much".

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Remote_Development13@reddit

Of course. The degree to which a person is in tune to all of that is quite dependent on whether a person feels threatened by AI IME.

Or whether they are already inclined to ponder the detrimental effects of resource extraction and the chaos of late stage capitalism. Lets not kid ourselves into thinking thats anything other than a minority position, though

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nonoanddefinitelyno@reddit

Anyone who doesn't do an actual physical job and also thinks AI won't affect their livelihood is utterly deluded.

I'm nearing the end of my working life and I would be terrified to be starting out now.

It is THE most dramatic change in history.

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apple_kicks@reddit

Honestly i think ai only works sometimes now because people with experience of manual workflows can verify and understand ai better.

Soon as generation with zero experience in how to work or think without following ai, are the only workers left. Companies will suffer or see constant errors

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Logbotherer99@reddit

Yeah, when the experienced staff overseeing the AI go there won't be experienced staff to replace them.

I get that it can replace loads of entry level jobs/tasks, but those are where you build the foundations of your experience.

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Whoisthehypocrite@reddit

Physical jobs are going to go too. Drivers, warehouse assistants, factory workers, fruit pickers, some parts of construction.

And other physical jobs are going to see earnings collapse as everyone trains to be a plumber and not a graphic designer or software engineer.

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

I have honestly considered becoming an electrician lmao.

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Yeanes@reddit

So many of the people who are very excited by it seem to be software developers and programmers whose jobs are at risk - i am yet to see a plumber or a teacher or surgeon displaying the same level of enthusiasm

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Ok_Bumblebee_2196@reddit

It's genuinely very useful for teaching in terms of helping tackle the admin work such as creating lesson plans.

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Remote_Development13@reddit

Conversely, I am yet to see a plumber or surgeon who are particularly worried about the impact of AI

Andy Masely's blog post covers this well (for those who don't want to watch a full video on it)

UnacceptableUse@reddit

They're using clean water though, and the water then has to go back through the water filtration systems

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Heinrick_Veston@reddit

Producing one hamburger uses around 2000 litres of water, using AI to write a 100 word email uses about 50ml.

If people are really concerned about conserving water, they’d be better off going veggie than stopping using AI.

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poptimist185@reddit

My guess is most people don’t eat several hamburgers a day though

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RealRefrigerator3129@reddit

Look at the scale though- 50ml Vs 2000L is 0.0025%- you'd need to perform 40'000 of those small AI tasks to equal 1 burger...

RealRefrigerator3129@reddit

We're talking about the comparison between AI and the hamburger here, not about whether AI is good on it's own.

Americans apparently eat 50 billion burgers a year- that's roughly 3 burgers a week per person, or 1 every 2.3 days. That's 17'000 tasks equivalent to the 100-word email per person, per day, just to match the water use producing hamburgers (and not accounting for other meat, of which hamburgers are only a small part).

OK, let’s talk about it.

Current global data centres are estimated to use about 1.5% of all electricity.

Electricity generation currently accounts for about 35–40% of global emissions. So if data centres use 1.5% of electricity, and electricity is responsible for roughly 37% of global emissions, that puts data centres at about 0.55% of global CO2 emissions (1.5% × 37% = 0.55%).

AI workloads are a minority of those data centre workloads, about a third to a half of the energy data centres use.

If you take the middle of that range, that means AI is responsible for maybe 0.2–0.3% of global CO2 emissions.

I have reduced my meat consumption drastically and no longer drink cows milk for this very reason. You are right to a degree but it doesn’t remove the issue. It’s whataboutism - something being worse doesn’t make something else not bad.

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h00dman@reddit

Edit: you can also eat a hamburger

I'm loving the thought of the imaginary mic drop moment you think this was.

If someone uses AI to finish the grunt work part of their task, freeing them up to more things that are genuinely useful, then it's a success.

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BasisOk4268@reddit

If the average person continued to use their brain, as we have for thousands of years, people would be unaffected.

If the average person stopped eating food entirely, they would not be unaffected.

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Heinrick_Veston@reddit

If humanity as a whole carries on as it has been, we’ll all be affected, because we’re destroying our world in many different ways.

If humanity develops sufficiently advanced AI systems then it could mitigate or solve climate change, food scarcity, disease, and many other hard problems.

We’d be better off regulating ai so that it is used for serious applications, and the other industries too.

But whataboutery always wins out, so people can ignore the reality that’s coming.

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rdu3y6@reddit

Text responses use a lot less computing power (and hence electric and water) than image generation does with video generation being the most power intensive. It's why rate limits for text is a lot higher than image and video gen.

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rabid-fox@reddit

Cows get water mostly from green water sources E.G rain, streams, grass. A small% is from irrigation so it has no real impact on water sacrcity. AI is 100% blue water.

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LieFearless1968@reddit

So many other things people find acceptable are significantly more harmful to the environment tho (e.g. beef) so it just seems illogical to ignore all of that and focus on something much less harmful just because it lets people virtue signal.

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BasisOk4268@reddit

I think the stark difference is beef gives sustenance to the global population. AI just consumes for generative videos and stuff that we can already do for no water wastage, that employs millions of people worldwide.

The ideal result of breeding cows is to feed humans. The ideal result of AI use is to take jobs away from humans, resulting in furthering poverty and wealth inequality, meaning more reliance on the state.

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LieFearless1968@reddit

The thing is there are many alternatives to beef which aren't as harmful (not just regarding water usage but also methane) but for many of the things people use AI for there isn't e.g. from easily getting a synthesised answer or writing emails which otherwise would've taken hours all the way to coding or medical research.

There are many other unnecessary things too which for some reason are excused as normal such as watching 4k videos, long showers, excessive lawn watering and buying plastic bottles/paper cups.

What are the comparative levels of water and energy usage?

You make it sound 1:1. Can you demonstrate that it’s the exactly the same situation in all these cases?

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Whoisthehypocrite@reddit

I do love the stolen intellectual property argument from humans who have spent years at university and in the workplace training themselves on the intellectual property of other humans without paying them for it. That is how we all learn...

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Happy_Ad_4357@reddit

I do love the publishing royalties don’t exist argument. Oh wait, no I don’t. It doesn’t make any sense.

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Slothjitzu@reddit

without paying them for it.

What do you think happens when you buy university books, pay course fees, or your workplace pays its training staff?

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Imperator_Helvetica@reddit

If I buy a book by Jane Smith and read it then I can learn to write like Jane Smith. If I steal her diary from her and copy her writing I have done it without permission or compensating her.

If big AI were asking permission and paying for art to feed to their model then it is up to individuals to sell it.

Also, I believe that my university tutors were being paid (though possibly not well enough) to share their knowledge with us and I think if I'd just repeated word-for-word their book, essay or paper I would not have been allowed to pass.

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GordonLivingstone@reddit

The US military is very keen on using AI to identify targets and plan attacks. Apparently being used in Iran right now.

Witness the big fuss when Anthropic were reluctant to let their product be used for purposes it considered unsafe.

So you mean to tell me Micron has pivoted away from consumer memory and gone all in on manufacturing as much memory as possible for a company that as only said they want to buy memory, not actually place an order?

In any other industry you'd be sacked for making such a move

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irrelevantusername45@reddit

The three memory companies have been known for price fixing in the past. I honestly think a big part of it is a move to try and suffocate China of resources.

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dbxp@reddit

I don't know how much of an actual manufacturing change there was. There's likely been some impact from AI however some of it may have been that the rumour mill resulted in stockpiling so there might be a glut now.

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Cubewood@reddit

Iran is literally threatening to blow up this according to you "non-existing" Stargate project https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/907427/iran-openai-stargate-datacenter-uae-abu-dhabi-threat

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dbxp@reddit

Stargate is a global project. What they're building now is the DC buildings but that's not where the big money goes. The big money is spent on the computing hardware, it's pretty common to build infrastructure for expansion which isn't funded yet, this isn't unique to AI or tech.

In the case of Dubai things are distorted due to the power of large sovereign wealth funds which can pay for construction upfront. The financing side of Stargate seems a bit murky but it seems that the plan is for the datacentres to be owned by investment funds with the investments managed by Softbank. OpenAI then leases them for operations.

All this adds up to some figures which are sort of theoretical best case scenarios. How much money has changed hands, who ends up holding the bag and who ends up gaining the profit is all a bit of a mystery.

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Mccobsta@reddit

Ssd have gone up so much that a 480gb one from a reputable brand is now £84 which used to be the cost of over a Tb

I for one can't wait for the bubble to burst and storage to become affordable again

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Fit_Adhesiveness7307@reddit

Honestly, I’m strongly against AI because above all other reasons, there is the fact that it’s already been shown to prevent people (and kids) from learning critical thinking.

Be really careful inputting your work into AI. We are strictly advised against inputting any academic work into AI software at my university, for reasons of data breaching.

I find it really useful for revision purposes. ie my current coursework is on One Hundred Years of Solitude, of which I've read and know which points I'm wanting to make. All I ask it for is specific quotes and page numbers - that way I can verify. Everything else usually from JSTOR.

It's an extrenelu valuable resource for me in accelerating my learning, as it means I don't waste time on technical issues like finding quotes in a 140,000 word book.

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bow_down_whelp@reddit

I don't put any confidential information in.

There seems to be different takes depending on the institution and what they find acceptable

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TujiTV@reddit

Yeah, everything you put into AI could end up being part of its training model. I can't imagine if you were using AI to iterate on your thesis and you end up getting flagged for plagiarism because AI has taken your work and spat it out to someone who published before you.

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StereotypicallBarbie@reddit

I have a friend who uses chat GPT for absolutely everything.. it’s ridiculous! She will ask it what colour to dye her hair.. what dog breed she should get.. what lipstick suits her skin tone.. she has it doing work assignments.. and even encourages her daughter to use it for college work!

I genuinely believe if someone took it away from her she’d be lost.

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spammmmmmmmy@reddit

I think you have missed the main thing that is scary about them at this particular moment: they do t just compile code faster... they write entire programs that work, and can almost do the job of a very experienced and high paid software developer. That upsets the economy of computer software and computer services in a big way. It's like the Industrial Revolution which took 100 years, compressed into two years and counting.

There are future upheavals but the software development upheaval is happening today.

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NationBuilder2050@reddit

Currently in a group in my office where we discuss how we’re using AI. There’s a real mix of how people are using it ranging from enhanced Google searches through to automating workflows.

If you’re only seeing it used as a enhanced Google search you’re probably not really seeing the full potential.

The potential of AI is not manually probing it to answer questions or do a task step by step. The potential is in Agentic AI. Where you have an AI enabled agent which is given the direction and autonomy to do multi-step tasks.

One thing I’d suggest is that AI adoption is going to need redesigning of workplace processes to make it work. A small example, AI (currently) struggles to make sense of excel tables which have merged cells, you need to go back to redesign the table to make AI work.

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Did_OJ_Simpson_do_it@reddit

It’s funny cos you can ask it stuff like “How would Captain Mainwaring have responded to the Iranian Embassy Siege?” or “Isn’t it amazing to think there WWI vets who lived to see the first iPhone?” and it gives interesting replies.

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Strange-Yam4733@reddit

I tried using Co-Pilot today to compare two excel based reports. After an initial "oh cool, it's understood what these things are and is referencing it back to me", I realised it's suggestions would give a very sub standard report my superior would not be satisfied with, and potentially not even useful. TLDR - I tried it, ended up back with pivot tables

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Fidgie0@reddit

You're missing the part where companies have put millions into developing it and really really really need everyone to start using it or else it was a collossal waste. So they're pushing it hard and putting it into everything and for the most part people seem generally ambivalent at best, so they push it harder.

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Redsfan1989@reddit

Yep.

AI is great for the following: Summarising minutes from very boring corporate meetings. This has meant that listening back to two hours of BS trying to capture everything verbatim for a bunch of narcissists who love their own voice has been reduced from a whole day to an hour tops, even with proof reading. So yeah, fair doos to AI for that.

AI is shite for the following: Literally everything else. Asking if to do anything with Excel in my experience, even getting really specific, is a no go for example.

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51onions@reddit

It's quite useful for porn, as it turns out. But for some reason, they don't want people using it for porn.

Before AI only the five richest kings of Europe could afford a piece of equipment called a Pornograph, which is used to practice the art of pornography. It's a large mahogany cabinet manufactured only in Switzerland.

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potatan@reddit

mahogany cabinet manufactured only in Switzerland

I wonder what pops out on the hour?

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Delicious-Being-6531@reddit

Not true. They also produce excellent rosewood ones in Lombardy, Bergamo produces some of the most exquisite examples.

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freak

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beardedslav@reddit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs

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apple_kicks@reddit

Tech companies underestimate how many computer illiterate people are out there. Only people getting use out of ai can do same thing manually or understand how computers think with data.

If we want to build new homes and infrastructure we need more grid power and data centres offer less for what it takes out our resources

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OrbitingPlanetArse@reddit

The power requirements for AI are frightening.

I read an article where the 80 or so data centres in Eire use around 18% of the country's generation capacity.

As a comparison, when the Anglesey Aluminium smelter was being planned in the 1960s, questions were being asked in Parliament about the facility's power needs. (Aluminium is produced by a form of electrolysis - it is fundamentally very power intensive). In operation, the smelter eventually used around 255MW of power: at the time, this was around 2% of the UK's generation capacity.

Yet the huge power requirement for AI seems to have crept up on us without anyone seeming to notice.

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apple_kicks@reddit

This is during housing crisis too. New builds need more energy but grid will suffer trying to supply both without huge investments

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Ok_Young1709@reddit

Insane that they underestimate that when most of them probably started work life in lower jobs and have dealt with the general public in some way. Every IT person should have at least one story about a user that has done something completely stupid, otherwise you are not an IT worker.

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TheDawiWhisperer@reddit

Only people getting use out of ai can do same thing manually or understand how computers think with data. Thats not enough people for whats paid into it

Yeah that's a reasonable summary, i use AI to write Powershell scripts for me to automate stuff but the really important bit is that i already know Powershell well enough to be able to sanity check whatever Copilot shits out and to correct the lies.

For example last week i asked Copilot do create me a way to monitor all automatic services on a server with some exclusions using a specific tool. Copilot confidently came back to me with a way that i know doesn't work so i was able to correct the question to get an actual useful answer.

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Spdoink@reddit

One of the worst things about CoPilot is how much honeydicking it does to you. It completely goes for utterly terrible ideas and executions, and will keep doing it long after logic should have intervened.

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Acceptable_Tower_609@reddit

I'm afraid you misspelled trillions there

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kunstlich@reddit

What'll be interesting over the next few years is watching how much of this trillions of dollars is actually spent, committed, or just letters of intent.

Ironfields@reddit

We are at the “we either create God in the next five years or the entire economy goes off like the Tsar Bomba and millions of people who never asked for this lose their livelihood” stage of capitalism. I’m so glad we have these maniacs running our lives, truly.

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KittyGrewAMoustache@reddit

I hate it so much it just seems so fucking stupid. Like who is it actually for? Some of it is genuinely useful but given the enormous amount of energy and water it requires, it seems horrific to have it used everywhere for everything even peoples random stupid musings or helping them compose social media posts about fripperies.

Just use it for niche stuff where it’s actually helpful. It’s nowhere near good enough for general use to replace humans. It’s just not for us, it’s not for humans so what’s the point? I can’t think j if many other inventions that have been so ‘anti human’ in so many ways other than maybe the atom bomb.

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QueenOfTonga@reddit

And the bubble goes *pop..

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Rigatoni_Soprano@reddit

I work for one of the largest automotive manufacturers, employing over 170,000 people worldwide. Early last year, we received an email from the board announcing that we needed to start using Copilot as part of a new partnership with Microsoft. They provided a few examples of how it could be used, but most of the messaging was filled with buzzwords and marketing jargon.

The uptake has been abysmal... there’s very little interest in using it. Since then, we’ve received several follow-up emails from the board, each one sounding increasingly passive-aggressive. They’ve hosted webinars and workshops, and even tried to get HR and IT to push adoption.

According to our local IT manager uptake has been less than 1%

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fergie_89@reddit

I'll be honest that I don't even know how to use it 🤣 my husband does as he uses it in bits for his job, my friend showed me how to use one to help write my report in a more formal way, but honestly? I don't really care. My job can't be replaced with it and if I get replaced it will be by someone much more senior than I.

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idlewildgirl@reddit

And the people that own the companies (Eg Open AI) aren't the most scrupulous.

I recently started a new job and part of the training was digesting and regurgitating some of the information shared into a presentation for the rest of the trainees. Everyone under 30 immediately took to ChatGPT to ask it to share what had already been explained to help create their presentations and it showed. They struggled to answer further questions on the relevant topics and it's no surprise that out of the group of 8 of us in that group half didn't make it past the first couple weeks.

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apeliott@reddit

I've been using it recently for work and it's been absolute garbage.

Constantly spewing out wrong information with great confidence.

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AlephMartian@reddit

You're very clearly using some sort of old free model or something. I remember a couple of years agio ChatGPT etc. were a bit hit and miss, but this just isn't the case any more when I use it (albeit on paid plans), and I use it regularly for all sort of things from coding to recipes to content creation. It's incredibly accurate, with maybe an error 5% of the time, but because I check it, that's not an issue (and no, checking it doesn't take anywhere near the time it would have taken to do the thing).

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StGuthlac2025@reddit

I'd say you need to get better at understanding how to use it.

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apeliott@reddit

Nah, I've given up at this point.

I've given it very clear instructions and it returns absolute nonsense with utmost authority.

It's quicker and more reliable for me to search for information myself.

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pale_doomfan@reddit

But if it admitted it didn't know, you might not ask it anything again...

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Remote-Ad5853@reddit

To its credit i’ll say it’s been amazing as a first time linux user! It’s very rarely been wrong about setup & sorting errors or helping me do things i had no experience of. No doubt this is because the active community with posts on forums and the arch wiki that it all nicked from them.

That said, one instance recently where I was having some issue and it jumped down into that exact thing if spewing nonsense with great confidence

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RecentTwo544@reddit

I keep meaning to make a spreadsheet of all the times Google's "Gemini AI" answer is wrong, and the times it is right.

It's probably about your 80% estimate that it is wrong.

I can now pick up on it, and often find myself saying to people "that doesn't sound right, did Gemini tell you that?" and yep, always. And I'm not even particularly intelligent or smart, so if I can pick up on it, it shows there's a major issue with it.

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apeliott@reddit

Yeah, and it's not just that it's wrong the majority of the time. It's that's I then have to go and manually check everything it says because it can't be trusted.

I might as well just do it myself in the first place.

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apple_kicks@reddit

Ai is doomed when they had to admit the hallucinations are a feature not a bug that goes away as it learns

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winter-2@reddit

I'll never understand why we need realistic AI images/videos. I can't think of a single positive use, and I've seen them used for so many bad things.

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Beautiful_Hawk548@reddit

So one of the things I heard and have repeated to a few people that really opens the whole thing up:

"Pepsi CEO says everyone will be drinking only Pepsi by next year!" You'd just write this off as the usual marketing BS right? You know Pepsi doesn't work in every application, some people already have agreements with Coke and some people also just don't like Pepsi. It's impossible but you'd wouldn't be going around telling everyone how silly it was, repeating their story and arguing for Fanta in every comment section. You know he's doing it because it's his job to say those things and try to achieve the impossible goal. If he came out and said "we'll probably hold roughly the same market share, it's the same sugar water it's always been." he'd probably lose his job.

So, when an AI CEO or CEO with a lot of money in AI tells people that "AI will do everything in a year!" why are we not using the same skepticism?

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disappointingcryptid@reddit

100%, I try to avoid the news but every time an “AI CEO predicts that there’ll be no more X jobs in a year!” headline slips through I just roll my eyes. They need people to believe it so they can keep their investors dumping in more money to be funnelled around between 5 companies.

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NorvernMankey@reddit

Borks2070@reddit

So, I'm in IT, have been for decades, and my recent work is all about the AI's. I'll give you my perspective.

Long story short. Automation. It replaces humans in the workflow. Not just help. It can help - it makes a single worker far more productive given the right environment and framework. It can also replace humans entirely.

I've just finished writing a system that takes what a department of financial people did, all day, everyday, and replaces all that work with an AI stack that does it in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. Not theoretical. Not might be. Not could do. Now. Done. Working. As of last month after a whole bunch of testing.

Automation is no stranger in IT, it's a good deal of what it's about when you get down to it. The difference here is in the past you couldn't (generally) automate things that required an actual human brain determining things, making decisions, pulling information out of documents to make an assessment, emails, processes. Now you can. At speed. At scale. For little cost. And often better than a human can do it.

Think of it like the industrial revolution, but instead of that automation taking labour away from people and replacing it with factories. The new automation is taking the *thinking* away from people and replacing it with a smart box.

If you expand this out even slightly you are facing the mass replacement of a whole bunch of white collar jobs.

Also add in a lot of creative low level processes are also now being automated with the same systems. Illustrators. All kinds of writers.

The hype you're seeing from these big companies is the realisation that they could capture much of the workforce in their own systems. You would rent out workers from them. Humans no longer required. Way faster. Way cheaper. No pesky worker rights. Or vacations. Or complaints. The market for this is literally in the trillions. If - you can reliably automate everything. AGI is really all about this. Do any job reliably. That's why there is a lot of investment into it.

No one has properly thought out the implications to this. Dystopia. Utopia. Unclear. No one is being particularly evasive about it either. There is a lot of commentary from the highest levels about AI being maybe the end of the world ( as we know it, or literally ). Is this reckless ? Yes. Should something be done ? Yes. Is something being done ? No. You are getting voices like Bernie Sanders saying there should be an immediate moratorium on AI development. Because the threat it poses. Economically if nothing else.

Also. You probably don't want to know what happens when you start releasing these kind of systems onto stacks where they have full control and power. Interesting things.

It's a bit of a wild west at the moment. If you're not active in the space. It can seem all a little weird and a little unreal.

If anyone is curious, I'd strongly suggest having a play with it yourself. Go seek out chatgpt, or claude, or gemini. Ask it itself what it can do (!). Maybe your own job. Reading documents. Parsing meaning. Managing businesses.

There's also a nice irony here. If you're cursing IT people busy engineering the collapse of all things with clever software. IT itself stands to be gutted by AI. As it turns out. AIs are not just "helpful at compiling". They can pretty much do the whole job themselves. They're not 100% perfect yet. But for a lot of stuff. They absolutely are. They are already writing whole chunks of code at openAI and anthropic themselves.

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Minimum_Possibility6@reddit

At my workplace all the documentation for code testing and identifying code gaps is done via ai. This is trained on company data, company processes and standards. It has meant that junior Devs that would spend half a day writing this up are kept working on the next ticket while all their output gets loaded into a stack that gets ran through this.

It doesn't do the testing just create the documentation about what the code is and does and how to test it before it's pushed to prod.

It saves a lot of time

We also have algorithms being used to monitor promotional effectiveness within the retail environment so we can identify on real time if things are working

The free use that people use barely scratches the surface

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Current LLMs are amazing at anything that's a language problem, the agentic capabilities are not mature enough yet for most people to have access and see the full potential, but they're coming. Even without any further development of the models they will eventually replace many jobs because business tasks will be made into language problems by adding APIs and CLIs that LLMs can interact with and take action in the real world. Lots of people aren't seeing the true potential because they're using free models, and their interface to it is a chatbot that can't autonomously take action.

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Extra_Actuary8244@reddit

Everyone I know who’s amused by ai is someone who would probably eat crayons thinking the colours were flavours

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HawaiianSnow_@reddit

Sounds like the take of someone who doesnt understand anything about AI.

Whether you use or believe in it's potential or not, this is a very low IQ and reductive statement.

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Extra_Actuary8244@reddit

I have a masters degree specialising in ai and the law actually

It’s okay to be impressed by the development and its uses in areas such as healthcare

If you’re impressed by ai fruit love island and making animals do funny things then you have the most room temperature iq I’ve ever seen

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BikeProblemGuy@reddit

I am skeptical of AI but it blew my mind this weekend. Using Gemini, it was perfectly able to identify, date and value antique cutlery. Just took a photo using the app of the makers stamp and voila.

The second use case was identifying old photos, it could read writing i was unable to and correctly identified locations base just on a prompt "somewhere on the south coast of the UK" and told me i was wrong on A couple of occasions (correctly)

The third use case is just to fix my extremely long winded english - finally i can write proper emails.

I have used it to write cyber security documentation and create technical illustrations also.

Downside, it doesn't know when it is completely wrong, it happily wrote a press release for a product, but half way down got mixed up with a different product - so check carefully. Also if you know the subject matter, you realize it just quotes webpages verbatim sometimes.

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Master-Trick2850@reddit

same hype as tesla "self driving" tech, its being sold as fully functional tech when its not

tesla self driving is not 100% safe

"AI" is not actually AI its just fancier predictive texting that links words together based on what its read

AI will lie to your face though and people are using it for questions they themselves dont know the answer to, so theyre impressed by the seemingly accurate looking answers

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worotan@reddit

People were confidently telling us that we’d all be in self-driving cars by now, a few years ago. They just want to be involved in something that sounds really aggressively confident, and are easily taken in.

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HiddenStoat@reddit

Its worth noting that self-driving cars are happening - just not as fast as some of the more optimistic predictions from 2020.

Waymo have done 200 million fully autonomous miles, and are scaling exponentially.

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skelly890@reddit

>Waymo have done 200 million fully autonomous miles

On a nice grid system, at slow speeds, with human overseers. I've been told self driving lorries are going to take my job within five years for the past ten years, but doubt we'll see self driving 42 tonne artics mixing it with the amateurs on the M25 any time soon. They've been 95% there for a while now, but it's that last pesky few percent that's proving difficult.

>and are scaling exponentially

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Over what timescale?

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HiddenStoat@reddit

On a nice grid system they know all about

They are coming to London this year, which is decidedly not a grid system! As the car gets better, it will be deployable to increasingly challening operating domains. This is an expected part of their scaling.

with human overseers

Waymo do not have overseers. Instead, the car is able to contact remote support and ask basic questions with simple yes/no answers (think questions like "Is it safe to go through these roadworks" or "Should I go left or right around this diversion").

Crucially, the remote support is not part of the safety system - the car itself decides when to contact remote support, and they are never involved in driving the car.

I've been told self driving lorries are going to take my job within five years for the past ten years

Yes, that is a very common thing with new technology, famously described in the Gartner hype cycle (see "peak of inflated expectations").

This doesn't mean the technology is not happening - it means it takes longer than initially thought.

And my understanding is they're easily panicked. They can tell what vehicles are, but a tarpaulin flapping around will throw them. And you don't want that.

I'm not sure I would use the word "panicked" for the Waymo driver. Your understanding might be correct for other systems described as self-driving (e.g. Tesla's) but Waymo (who are the leader in the space) are years ahead of Tesla, and it's important to not confuse the capabilties of the two.

I'm not sure what you mean by "exponentially". Over what timescale?

I mean that the growth in miles driven for Waymo is following an exponential function - the number of miles they drive increases 10-fold about every 2 years.

This graph should make things clearer - every horizontal line represents a 10-fold increase in the number of miles driven.

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skelly890@reddit

We'll see. I'm retiring shortly so aren't worried about self driving lorries, but that last few percent is really hard - possibly even exponentially over your timescale of choice - and needs to be solved for the obvious reason that 42 tonnes at 56mph is a lot of inertia.

Waymo pootling around town at 15 - 20? Sure. Not a huge problem if it has stop and phone home. Sounds OK. Ideal ride home from the pub.

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GeeJo@reddit

And a big hold-up is that self-driving cars don't just have to be as safe as a human driver - they have to be utterly perfect.

If every car in the U.S. had magically been made self-driving in 2024, and 40,000 people died in crashes, it'd be an unimaginable scandal and catastrophe. It'd still be fewer than actually died on the roads that year, though.

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Nervous_Designer_894@reddit

As an AI Engineer I strongly disagree with this take.

The predictive text analogy really downplays how fucking impressive the reasoning abilities of AI is right now.

davidwhitney@reddit

I recently had Cowork plan a 5 country trip, providing me with flight options to match my preference and make good / effective connections by driving my browser, providing options for feedback and opening the booking pages for me to verify and complete. Worked excellently. I'd not let it do it unattended, but it did exactly what I would have done.

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RecentTwo544@reddit

I travel a fair bit too, and I'm struggling to see how this saved any time or was more efficient.

Like I've said to others, it's not that I'm deliberately being down on AI, I WANT it to be good. It would be amazing to have AI that I could just give access to my calendar and it would book all flights and hotels for me and any crew/team/DJs I'm responsible for, send all the info/booking confirmations/boarding passes to their email, and I didn't have to worry about any of it. But it can't.

I've asked multiple times on the AI sub how to get it to automate my guestlist emails, a boring mundane admin task that is a tiny part of my work but takes up an annoying amount of time. Every time it breaks down into an insane argument with AI bros insisting this is "easy" but not able to explain how, then downvoting anyone who points out they're not answering the question.

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davidwhitney@reddit

Ok, let me be really specific - because I do not have an AI to sell you :)

Install Claude Cowork
Go to integrations and enable Google Gmail, Google Calendar integrations
Install the Cowork for Chrome plugin
Ask it to look at your diary bookings for trips, and find flights on Skyscanner *following whatever preferences you have for flights* and return a bunch of options for you to pick from.
Go away for an hour, do something else, whatever
Come back, look at it's summary, ask it to open up the booking pages for whatever you pick, pretty much just click pay.

Previously I would spend time lining up flights, comparing prices / carriers / various upgrades etc, it just gives you an accurate rundown (it was the first time so I tried this so I did check), probably did what I'd have spent an evening doing in an hour of it driving the browser, with about 15 minutes of my own human effort.

That's precisely how it worked for me, YMMV. (I speak at conferences about technical things, so I also had it check flights with event organisers by drafting me emails, I set it off, high preview on each of the drafts, and a couple days later when they all responded I did the final 15 minute booking bit).

I suspect if you were booking flights for a whole team it'd take a bit more coordination to get right, though likely less than doing it all by hand. The key unlock above for me was it was doing this via driving my own browser (which I'm sure folks will note isn't the most secure thing to let an agent do). I don't normally use Chrome, so was relatively satisfied it could only access things I'd expressly logged into at the start of the session.

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RecentTwo544@reddit

I'll give it a go on some dummy accounts and see how it goes! No way I'd let it loose on my work stuff until I understand and can test it.

Perhaps more importantly, could it do the following -

I get guestlist stuff coming in all the time for events. I pop them in a Google Sheet, different page for each event. Column A is the person's name, column B is their email, column C is the type of access they get.

People the DJ is working with (managers, label folk, business partners, close friends, etc) get full AAA access. People who are important enough we want to give them a good time and keep them sweet but don't want them cluttering up the stage/booth/green room will get VIP. Random folk the DJ has bumped into at an airport they gave guestlist to, will just get GA.

I then send emails out to each person, which change depending on the level of access.

They are NOT mass Bcc emails, a different email for each one.

The subject will be "THEIR NAME // NAME OF DJ, NAME OF EVENT/VENUE, DATE" which I want pulled from the header on the Sheet for the event name, and their name pulled from column A.

The "To" field will, obviously, be pulled from Column B.

Column C is the biggie, and is the difference between a good time and disaster.

If they're down as GA it should say something like "your name is on the guestlist queue at the main entrance" but for AAA it will be something like "do NOT head to the main entrance, head to the backstage entrance at (details of where it is) and if any issues call me on (and then my number or the number of someone at the venue)."

Obviously you don't want some randomer the DJ met being given AAA and my number. So the jeopardy if this goes wrong is quite high.

Few people have suggested options, most of which either didn't work, or the thread was deleted so I couldn't find it when going to try it out.

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davidwhitney@reddit

Probably - I've just fed the above and asked it to produce a precise spec/skill that *might work* - it gave me this - https://gist.github.com/davidwhitney/9b3625b2d93dc1191df47b794ed78bc0

Though honestly, if it were me, I'd get it to create a Google sheets automation to do this if it's as structured as you make it sound above, as I'd know it'd then always, perfectly, reflect my data, rather than be open to any non-deterministic behaviour.

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paradoxbound@reddit

Just talking to a model in NLP (Natural Language Programming) is ok. Where it starts becoming powerful is when the tools interacting with the model can mimic a role within an organisation. My own harness for doing this is based on free and open source software. Has a bunch of custom skills that mimic real world roles. One for team brainstorming, one for technical design, a CSO role and many others. This is then wrapped in an application that can run multiple copies of these roles in parallel. I then use many individual sub agents to write code very quickly. Once they have completed the the task, I review it suggest corrections, once I consider it good enough I then pass it on to other team members for further human review.

The amount of work I can do in a day is multiplied by a factor of 5-10.

This is why the ownership class is so excited, they can replace a lot of human resources with tools like this.

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MarkRand@reddit

Whilst you're certainly not wrong about it being hyped, I would say that AI is a revolution and everyone who does anyform of "Knowledge Work" should be investing time into how their career can benefit from utilising AI.

I'd also say that, depending on what "intelligence" is, we do have AGI already. As a software developer, it is very difficult to create puzzles that are not easily solvable by AI more quickly than a human. However, the current limitation is the amount of context that an AI can hold for a given solution, I think this is where knowledge work is moving. Well, along with original thought of course although arguably even humans don't have many truly original thoughts!

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worotan@reddit

Well, along with original thought of course although arguably even humans don't have many truly original thoughts!

That’s as limited a view of reality as computers can manage. You really need to widen your life experiences.

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MarkRand@reddit

I was paraphrasing Mark Twain

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.

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No_Point_3172@reddit

I made a picture of my 2 coworkers walking next to each other into a picture of my 2 coworkers holding hands and distributed it.

Got a good laugh.

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finniruse@reddit

Probably the agents side of it at the moment.

Claude Code can be installed on your computer and take charge of you PC. You can set it so that it has multilevel tasks.

So let's say your job requires you to do a newsletter on a Friday. You could set up a multi step programme that scans for news choices, writes a blurb, fills in the links and hyperlinks. (This is just an example and might not be fully accurate but illustrates the point?).

A good user of AI could automate large parts of their job and be far more valuable than someone without.

This is preliminary stuff that people are fiddling with at home. You can imagine soon agentic AI becoming much more available.

If this is the future, big questions around what work will look like and whether it'll even be enjoyable. How do you prepare yourself for this? And, this is just one thing. We just have no idea what it's all going to do or mean. Just terrifyingly fast and rapid transformation.

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Lol. If your post was aimed at triggering me, it worked. I'll concede the e in homogenises, but the rest is from just typing too quickly and not proofing my informal Reddit comment.

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zero_iq@reddit

I know, just some lighthearted teasing. I used to work with technical writers, so I've clearly learned what buttons to press to get a rise when mistakes slip through 😅

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The mistake was calling it artificial intelligence... It's basically a glorified predictive text program. Calling it AI got everyone's hopes up, and caused massive overspending in the tech sector.

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Puzzman@reddit

One factor I haven’t seen mentioned is the scope for improvement. I think of it like the internet in the 90s only useful if you knew what you were doing.

AI will probably follow the same path bubble now and then everywhere by 2050…

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_Rookwood_@reddit

Probably the most transformative technology in my lifetime. It may eclipse the internet. It will save billions of hours of work and all that extra time and money can be devoted to other things.

The transition will be very disruptive and some people in previously secure white collar work will be replaced. But that's the nature of progress.

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I_will_never_reply@reddit

AI is already running aspects of your life and you don't even know it

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AffectDangerous8922@reddit

Think of it like the email from the "Nigerian Princess", which specifically targets old CEOs.

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AffectDangerous8922@reddit

You are missing the part where AI Conmen sweet talk their way into a meeting with a board of grey haired Executives who have zero idea how tech works, most don't even own a cellphone.

These Execs will gladly risk your job by investing ridiculous sums of money into a scheme which will specifically do away with your job. After all, these grey haired execs who will soon be dying of old age (if we are lucky) automatically know better than anyone who has less money than them. And once they have invested All of the company profit into the AI Ponzi scheme, they have to fire you to maintain company profit.

You are missing how powerful it is and how powerful it is going to get.

Because even right now it is already disrupting the white collar job market.

From technical perspective, there are already enough breakthroughs and techniques that will allow AI to perform almost any white collar job in the nearest future, but most people that think AI is "all hype" point to the smallest, cheapest and obsolete models like Google search or free ChatGPT tier and have never used any advanced models and features, like paid tiers, MCP and agentic models. Which can already take the models to the level of middle-level programmers or other specialists.

And even then, in technical terms, the AI right now is "the worst it will ever be". Most modern AI are taught using verifiable rewards and user data. If AI fails to execute some task, once it executes it successfully - it will learn how to do it and similar tasks successfully in the next iterations. If the user helps it or guides it or argues with it that it executed the task wrong - it also gets fed back as a training signal. Since all of the companies are starting to use AI internally for different tasks, the AI is going to get a ton of high quality training data, and get better at corporate tasks. And as it gets better, more and more corporations and businesses are going to start using it.

And I'm not even starting on technical improvements, that promise 10x-100x cheaper AI for multiple tasks. And that's also not counting the hyperscaler datacenters that are just getting finished, and it's also not counting the compounding improvements in AI chips with photonic compute, thermodynamic compute and neuromorphic compute which can also bring 1000x improvements.

tl;dr: the white collar is fucked if you can have a £5/day thinking machine that never sleeps and performs 24/7

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Tundur@reddit

Put it this way, my company used to have 1 QA resource for every 12 call-centre frontline workers. That role is now done by LLMs (working in a very controlled way, we're not idiots) with minimal supervision. We've gone from observing 3 calls a month per employee, to every single call, without any drop in accuracy. We're catching a hell of a lot more incidents where processes aren't followed (because humans aren't very consistent) and are fixing them in hours, not weeks later when someone gets around to checking.

We've not made anyone redundant because we're growing quickly enough as a business, but we're certainly not hiring anyone.

With new development practices in our technology function we've also fully digitised our most critical customer journeys in about 6 months with a team of about 10 devs, when previously that would have been a multi-year technology change involving dozens of highly paid resources. Our NPS is up, our call wait times have disappeared, and we're no longer looking to expand our callcentre footprint.

We are a company of about 3000, who were expecting to hit 5000 in the next 2 years. If even a handful of our current work programmes using AI are successful (and Iran doesn't sink any container ships full of GPUs), that's 2000 jobs removed from the economy, and all our customer satisfaction metrics have gone up in the process.

Granted, I'd say we're ahead of the curve, but it's still a curve - every other business that can follow suit, will.

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chs0c@reddit

By far the most useful thing AI has given me is the sheer upswing in productivity. I do a lot of data analysis, script coding, and I’m always having to research something.

People are p[aying attenbtion to the extreme's. The "it's all useless" and the "it's all amazing!".

Truth lies somewhere in the middle. We're trying a new technology out and where ti fits, companies are hopping onto to trying to find ways to make it fit in ways people like. For some, it's finding a foothold, and for others it's not.

It looks like it's starting to work for some low effort art things for example. Basic marketing templates or translation stuff for example. But it's not working for many IoT things like fridges or whatever...though a lot is smoke and mirrors and many things advertising Ai doesn't even have AI.

Chat bots are WWAAYY more ADVANCED. I use it more and try to as it's been really handy. Good example was recently I was doing my washing and look at my washing machine and thought for the 100th time..."I wonder what all the symbols mean, am I using the right setting?" Well I used Gemini and asked it, turned my camera on, pointed it at the dial when asked, answered a few questions on what clothing I was putting in and it recommended 2 settings based on speed and quality of wash I needed, it did start going into more detail but I stopped it.
Pretending that chat bots are no better is compairing current shitty ones with old shit ones. They just haven't got good AI chatbots. I remember when we all used to have to deal with the terrible old chat bots trying to go see a movie Bot: "What movie are you looking for?" Me: "The Fat and The Furious". Bot: You said....My Big Fat Greek Wedding...is that right?". They were significantly worse and now I can have full blown conservation where it can look up things for me. I've also done things like "Can you put the next rangers european game in my calendar for me" and it'll run off, look up when it is and create a calendar entry for me.

There's definitely uses for this stuff and certainly ones that I won't know about as well as all the tried but is useless uses for it. There's a bubble, and the bubble will burst eventually. But we aren't going to be left with nothing, just hopefully what it's useful for.

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Due_Professor_8736@reddit

I’m learning another language and compared to the last time i did this it’s a night and day different experience. To be clear. AI isn’t real intelligence. Most of what it does could have been previously possible. But it’s how quick and versátile it can be.

I can ask it to prep 20 sentences at my level formatted for copy paste into my flash card app. Done. I’m speaking the foreign language to the AI and it’s grading my pronunciation. It’s engaging with me over speech and text. Providing corrections and feedback. It’s a dedicated teacher and study buddy. I can get reading and listening comprehension tests on the fly. I can submit written work for it to critique. We can role play the things that will be in the exam interview..

I started in Jan. A few private lessons but basically just using AI tools and AI supported apps. Exam next month and feeling confident.

I haven’t bought or opened a book. I don’t write anything down.

I use ai chat to get answers about grammar or common usage. And any doubts I’ll get covered in private lessons which are mainly to check my level and introduce new topics and my chance to engage with a native speaker..

So now Imagine a classroom. All kids have AI guided learning that suits their learning style. The AI builds a profile on how best to teach each of them.. The actual teacher has a dashboard showing progress and can dive in to help as needed.. as kids demonstrate understanding they are freed for group work or to progress ahead..

There just needs to be an initial onetime effort to give the tool guardrails. Just parameters to work in. Treating it as AI even as a chatbot is a mistake. It doesn’t know anything. But once it is told what facts it can share and approved methods to impart then it can be a good tool for learning at a basic level. You can drill repeatedly, tailor materials to fit your interests etc. that classroom can have each kid get examples fitted around their interests..

People will say “it hallucinates” so hence my points about keeping it on a short leash.

In general work. It’s another tool. How it gathers meeting notes from a group call. Pick out the salient points and actions is genuinely impressive. People that are already tech savvy should be using it to more quickly automate workflows. Companies whose main workflow is “calls and email” will struggle to derive benefit..

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EvilKerrison@reddit

Here's the point : It doesn't need to fully replace a human to be devastating/revolutionary (delete as fits your point of view)

AI is getting extremely good at completing many time intensive human tasks - writing code, reports, documentation, data processing, summarising meetings & action points, and many more besides. If AI can do 50% of your job it doesn't mean you're safe because of the other 50%... it means there are twice as many people doing your job as needed. For each such role affected, either productivity doubles (if demand is there) or head count halves.

I pick 50% as an easy number to work with... some industries will be higher, some lower. In the end it all comes down to a choice - either be someone who's good at using AI to get things done, or see yourself replaced by someone else who is. It's not clear how fast this is going to happen. That's going to vary depending on the sector too. But it's coming.

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Airurando-jin@reddit

Siri is useful to a point, I use it to help with verbal reminders.

Alexa is partially useful for automations but really I supplement it with HomeAssistant (and could probably almost entirely replace it with it. We run ours off of an old Chromebook).

AI. Yeah it helps coders but it has its other uses too. I’ve used most of them and see the most benefit from using Claude.

I’ve got ADHD, and ironically my job is pretty intensive with a lot to manage and balance.

I can give Claude some default strict criteria in terms of how to deal with me, what not to do, how to act, give it a role (like a consultant in my field, and /or adhd coach or accountability partner) and brain dump everything on my mind that I feel I need to to tackle in general / that week between work and home.

It then gives me a list of priorities, triages everything and keeps me right. It can integrate with quite a bit and so I could partially automate some of my work processes, or help manage my workflow.

So for me, it’s useful.

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cozywit@reddit

It's the combine harvester.

We don't change the food we eat. We don't change how we grow it.

But it now takes a couple factories of a few thousand, then a couple of farmers to replace hundreds of field hands, hand harvestting.

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AgeingChopper@reddit

someone has to buy all the products, with nobody working that's going to get challenging.. unless a new reason to employ people is found.

it normally turns up but i've no idea what it will be.

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cozywit@reddit

When jobs get automated. The workers typically move to more obscure difficult tasks that were typically out of reach or too expensive for the standard product.

Build your first car with 100 workers. It's basic because they're hand building it, just an engine, chair and body. Nothing fancy because for 100 workers, you can't make it any more advanced.

Now you've got a robot that can weld the car chasis. Now you only have 80 workers needed. But you can still sell a car that costs 100 workers, so you add electric windows and a stereo. Installed by those 20 spare workers.

You now get automated installers and spray painters, your basic car would only need 40 workers. But with the extra workes you can use them to install a more complex efficient engine, you can have nicer seats, etc.

Same with software. A company of 100 that could produce a game with say 4000 assets. Well with AI they could fire their team down to 10 and stil make a 4000 asset game. They still sell it as if it cost 100 people. Or another company with 50 people could build another game with 200,000 assets. Why would you buy the original game? Unless they drop the original game price down to 10 person building it.

As we automate and advance, we can do more or we make things substantically cheaper. Anyone that just does the same with less, will be out compete.

What we need to protect is the consumers choice and the producers right to compete.

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AgeingChopper@reddit

who knows where all the workers will go.

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SapientPro_Team@reddit

You're benchmarking against the wrong things. Siri and retail chatbots are bad because nobody put real models into them. AGI is a separate conversation.

The actual shift is boring B2B stuff nobody posts about. Contract review going from 6 hours to 20 minutes. Support tickets auto-tagged at scale. Code migrations quoted at 18 months shipping in 6 weeks. Devs doing in 3 days what took 3 weeks.

None of it is sci-fi. All of it is replacing paid human work today. That's why budgets are moving not because anyone believes the AGI pitch.

"It's not AGI yet" and "it's not changing anything" are two very different claims.

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ClumsyPortmanteau@reddit

My company's "sustainability and climate change manager" sent out an email this morning inviting employee's kids to make a poster for Earth Day and stated clearly (bold and underlined) that the posters should be hand-drawn. The email included a poster with the instructions and some artwork and a tagline "Save our Earth, Secure our Future".

He created the poster with AI. He did not see the irony when I questioned it.

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AirconGuyUK@reddit

He created the poster with AI. He did not see the irony when I questioned it.

I would imagine the AI inference was cheaper in terms of climate cost than the amount of resources a day of human labour takes. The drive to work, the food a human consumes, the power the computer uses (200w * 7 hours)..

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ClumsyPortmanteau@reddit

I guess so? It will have taken him 5 minutes to input his needs and get the poster out of it, so I'm sure the actual environmental cost of this single use of AI is not very large in the grand scheme of things.

Out of touch suits and tech bros are trying to push it so that they can manipulate the AI into suggesting things that benefit them and their creepy co-conspirators.

They've wasted untold fortunes, destroyed wildlife habitats and ruined the consumer technology market because if they stopped now in their eyes they'd see it all as money down the drain. It really should be. I truly hope that it fails catastrophically for them and gets pruned back so that all AI is used for is menial tasks and assistance with said tasks.

My job isn't even AI adjacent; in fact it's blocked and banned at work. I just hate it.

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njchandu@reddit

AI Agents can do a lot more than basic admin tasks in Excel. The Agents can do pretty much anything one can do on a computer and at a much faster rate with more consistency (https://www.mongodb.com/resources/basics/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents). Some white-collar jobs are going to be replaced in the medium term, and we as a society are not prepared for it.

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ChelseaRoar@reddit

As someone in a tech job, it's absolutely absurd what it can do. It's very early on in it's existence in the grand scheme of things but if you know what you're doing already, and to be fair that is a big if, it's a stupidly powerful tool.

Doom mongering on potential is a misunderstanding of how far along it already is. People should be doom mongering on what it already does.

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Sea_Pomegranate8229@reddit

You are missing the power of AI. As a simple example: I can type this query to an LLM that old Google search would fall over on. Imagine what a doctor, chemist, marketer, CFO could do with this at their fingertips.

"I’m planning a weekend trip to Edinburgh with my 7-year-old and my 70-year-old mom. We love history but need to avoid lots of stairs. My mom uses a wheelchair sometimes, and my kid gets bored after 30 minutes in museums. Give me a 2-day itinerary with:

3 kid-friendly historical spots (with interactive elements)
2 wheelchair-accessible cafes near those spots
1 indoor activity for if it rains
Travel tips for getting around with a wheelchair and a stroller
A rough budget for a family of 3 (mid-range, no luxury)"

I had to redo basically everything it did. It made the process take twice as long and produced worse work product as a result.

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nfk99@reddit

i love it! it knows everything. you are probably not asking very clever questions.

imagine having all human knowledge in your pocket and not liking it...lol

this is a you problem.

(don't get me wrong i also know its going to ruin humankind and be the end of us)

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Intelligent-Royal682@reddit

Just a personal example, I was asked as part of my job to Photoshop out a section of a photograph and replace it with what would have been in the background.

Not usually my field at all, never used photoshop before and was worried it would take me a very long time as I would need to learn the basics of the software etc.

I loaded up the software, clicked the AI button, highlighted the stuff I wanted gone and told it to replace with certain other things in the image. Job that probably would have taken days took me roughly 5 minutes (tried a few different iterations).

Now imagine the people out there whose job is to essentially do what I just did, in 5 minutes, with zero experience or qualification.

That's why people are worried.

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binaryhextechdude@reddit

I think AI is far more capable than it's allowed to be and that's by design. I've been using Copilot to help me with researching parts for my new PC build. I ask a question and expect to receive a full answer but it only does 20% of the work, writes a ton of text and then saysd "Would you also like me to do xyz?" Well yes, I expected XYZ would be part of the original answer. This repeats 3, 4, 5 times until you get through all the "Do you want me to also..."

All I can think is they are deliberately hobbling it to avoid public outcry. Kind of live driving assist featues. I'm pretty sure cars can drive themselves but they limit the tech to land guidance, collision avoidance etc because people will accept that.

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It doesn't do 'basic admin' anymore, it can do a crazy amount of stuff. You have 2 x 200 sets of files, with some differences, and you want to go through them all, list the differences, and come up with a general sense of what's the problem? It'll write a python script for you, run it for you, do the work, analyse the results and come back with the results for you.

LLMs are only as good as your ability to use them. "Prompt engineering" is a thing.

You want to write a complaint about something and for it to sound well written and have a certain tone? It'll do it - but still, only as well as you can write a prompt.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

It's an amazing research tool, even for day to day stuff.

It tells people to add non-toxic glue to make cheese stick to pizza, and that you should eat at least one small rock a day.

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

It literally says you can't digest rocks immediately after saying you should eat them.

These tools (and you're looking at the crappy AI used by Google's search engine) need some common sense whilst being used.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

It literally says you can't digest rocks immediately after saying you should eat them

Yet it still suggests eating them.

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

I just asked CoPilot "How many rocks a day should I eat?"

It's response was - Zero. You shouldn’t eat rocks at all.

I Google Gemini and the response is "I'm going to have to stop you right there- hopefully before you reach for a pebble! The short answer: You should eat exactly zero rocks per day"

If you're using Google search to 'gotcha' AI and grab screenshots you are just being disingenuous.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

I simply don't need to ask an LLM if I should eat rocks, because I don't rely on a machine to do my thinking for me.

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

ok, cool. But when I want to find a hotel in Venice with specific requirements and I don't fancy searching several dozen websites, I'll use a LLM.

Or I want to search my codebase to check for specific stuff, or to explain how a complicate script works without me spending an hour deciphering someone else's code - I'll use an LLM.

I'm not saying use one for everything. Use some damn common sense. Like not eating rocks, or needing to ask if you should or not.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

But when I want to find a hotel in Venice with specific requirements and I don't fancy searching several dozen websites, I'll use a LLM.

I would use Google, because again I don't need to offload basic congitive function on a machine. I am capable of evaluating results myself.

Honestly it's embarrassing you admit to using it for such trivial things.

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

Have you seen how many hotels there are in Venice? Now I don't know much about the place, but I know there are LOADS. I wanted one close to the public-transport boat stations as I'll have a lot of cases. I wanted one close to tourist stuff, but also not in too busy an area. I wanted a room that could fit 4 people, but also not be on too high a floor as we'll have lots of cases (since it's just a stop before another trip).

It's a multi-variate problem that requires geographic information, transport information, lots and lots of hotel information.

It's a great case for using an LLM to narrow down options

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glasgowgeg@reddit

Have you seen how many hotels there are in Venice? Now I don't know much about the place, but I know there are LOADS.

As a human being, you equally (I assume) possess the cognitive function to evaluate them yourself.

You're not sitting looking at a list of literally every single hotel in existence, you can go on Booking.com and select your filters to eliminate what you don't want, then use your adult brain to evaluate them yourself.

Again, I would simply not embarrass myself by admitting I have to offload thinking for something so trivial. It's why there's several studies indicating reduced cognitive function in those who use AI.

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

Even using booking.com, filtering by the rooms with 4 people, and price requirements, I end up with around 60+ options. Of course it was the first thing I did. And using the Google Hotel finder. And a few other search sites.

My big issue was geographic constraints. I've never been before, I don't know the public and private transport options. I don't know the stop locations. I don't even know where the main tourist areas are. Of course, the first thing I did was read up on this.

But.. I still had many dozens of hotels that I would have to search the walking distances from public transport stops. Distance only doesn't work in Venice - or you end up with a stop 50 foot from you - and it's on the other side of a canal with no bridge!

In the end the LLM only found about 4 really suitable hotels. It saved me hours of time, after I had already put in plenty of research myself. We found a nice boutique hotel with good reviews, 5 minutes walk from a gondola stop, at a good price, on the edge of a tourist area.

Would I have got there in the end? Maybe. Probably. But would I have spent hours of my time doing this? Yes.

It's just an example of a problem. Of course, any competent person should be able to do what an LLM can do. It's how much effort and time you want to put into it that is the reason they're being adopted so much.

To ignore them is to fall behind the curve in the workplace as much as someone who refused to use the internet in the 90s.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

I end up with around 60+ options

That's the point you use that aforementioned big adult brain.

But would I have spent hours of my time doing this? Yes.

Skill issue, again a skill that will be deteriorating as a result of your reliance on a machine doing your thinking for you.

To ignore them is to fall behind the curve in the workplace as much as someone who refused to use the internet in the 90s.

Not really. You're relying on a machine to do your thinking for you, your critical faculties inevitably deteriorate as a result, and (as I already linked you) several studies show that it has negative cognitive effects on those who use it.

It's not the same as someone refusing to use the internet, but then again I wouldn't be shocked if you asked AI to generate this sloppy argument for you.

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

You're going to get destroyed by an army of Gen Z who have been using this stuff since their teens. They'll be leveraging this like their own personal offshore team while you're plodding along on your own.

Does it offload stuff from your brain to a machine? Yep. So do spellcheckers and calculators.

Will you look like a simpleton in 5-10 years if you don't get on the AI-useage train? Very much so.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

You're going to get destroyed by an army of Gen Z who have been using this stuff since their teens

I work with Gen Z exztensively, they're woefully inept when it comes to basic problem solving and computer use.

If it's not an app or a walled-garden system like a mobile device, they don't know what they're doing. I think I'll be fine.

Does it offload stuff from your brain to a machine? Yep. So do spellcheckers and calculators.

I don't rely on either of those, but for a calculator it won't do everything for you, you still need a basic understanding of what you're trying to do.

Will you look like a simpleton in 5-10 years if you don't get on the AI-useage train? Very much so.

Again, several studies show that your cognitive function is deteriorating as a result of AI usage, so the simpletons will be the ones using it.

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

BTW - the future of teaching - personalised textbooks - https://research.google/blog/learn-your-way-reimagining-textbooks-with-generative-ai/

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glasgowgeg@reddit

Should I wait a few minutes before addressing this comment so you have time to edit it?

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

If you want my bestest spelling, yes.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

You're not just changing spelling though, you're substantially changing all your comments to add several new sentences without declaring what you've added.

If you're not going to engage in good faith, why bother replying?

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

I'll slow down my reply cadence to sort this out then. It's not a chat window, is it?

It is a shame there's no wikipedia-esque easy view (unless there is and I've not looked for it?) to show edits and changes.

You don't have to like AI, but acting like a Luddite is going to hit you when you're older and the world revolves around it.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

I'll slow down my reply cadence to sort this out then. It's not a chat window, is it?

No, but you can engage in good faith by accurately stating what you're changing when you edit.

It is a shame there's no wikipedia-esque easy view (unless there is and I've not looked for it?) to show edits and changes.

It's a shame some users engage in bad faith and don't accurately label what they've added.

You don't have to like AI, but acting like a Luddite is going to hit you when you're older and the world revolves around it.

It's not being a luddite to not rely on a system that makes people more stupid. In a world that relies on AI, the person capable of thinking for themselves will be king, etc etc.

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

Like it or not, technological change over time has meant deskilling, and then reskilling.

I don't grow my own food. I don't sew my own clothes. I don't hand wash them all. I don't fax stuff to people. I don't use a typewriter or printing press.

It's a fundamental change in human technology. I think we're still in the early to mid part of the S curve - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phases-of-the-S-curve-of-technology-5_fig1_341763864 and it'll get smarter, and use less power.

Sorry about not stating my edit. I'm not intending to misinform or act in bad faith. Sometimes I just have other ideas after I hit comment, then forget to add an edit mark.

I do think AI will deskill us and we'll use less of our brains on some things but we'll be free of some mental load, to then use it on other things. We're in a transitional phase and it's changing about as quick as we can keep up. It'll fundamentally change our lives and societies, so it's daft to ignore it.

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glasgowgeg@reddit

I'd settle for you not substantially changing all your comments to add several new sentences without declaring what you've added.

If you're not going to engage in good faith, why bother replying?

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RecentTwo544@reddit

While you're kind of right, that's a dreadful example.

People in my line of work are specifically warned (and most people with half a brain know anyway) NEVER to use Gemini for hotel/flight information because it gets it wrong often, like it does with many things, which can lead in this instance to real world problems very quickly.

So you can use lots of energy and water unsustainably, to plan an unsustainable lifestyle even more easily.

Why are you just ignoring climate science? Does it need to be made fun before you’ll be interested?

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811545b2-4ff7-4041@reddit

I see you're using Reddit, hosted on AWS servers, that also use a bunch of energy and cooling facilities. Have you tried to not and to save the planet? How about turning off your phone/PC/laptop also?

Think about what can be done on the internet now, vs what could be done in the 90’s. That’s essentially what people are banking on.

Sure right now it is mainly boosting efficiency and basic tasks automation. Some people are making use of it for content creation, and we’ve seen vast improvement in image/video/sound creation from ai over just a few years.

There’s also the more technical aspect of the research and development of mathematics behind ai has exploded, further our understanding and toolkit for modelling the world and making these tools better.

I think the true bloom will start when automatons start replacing the jobs of humans in manual jobs. Very easy to see how a company making “Bricklayer 9000” that has perfect balance and dexterity, can be deployed to a building site and work 24/7, replacing a human worker for a huge productivity boost and cost saving.

The same for health and social care. Replace the nappy changing, bathing, bed changing, cleaning etc with robots and free up humans to just do the actual medical work like injecting medicine etc.

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Exasperant@reddit

I'm all for the "The World Of Tomorrow" as promised in over staurated pieces from the 1950s, but this world of freeing up humans to do other things also requires a revolution in how humans acquire food, clothing, shelter etc now they're living in a world that has massively reduced its need to pay them for anything.

I'm not sure the profit driven money machines pushing AI into our lives are really so keen on that aspect...

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worotan@reddit

Been hearing this for decades. It’s always just around the corner..

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PhobosTheBrave@reddit

You’ve not been hearing about ai for decades, at least not outside of sci-fi like terminator.

These technologies exist now.

Boston Dynamics have been developing robot tech for years.

China had a display recently showing incredible dexterity and balance of their robots.

Ai models are rapidly advancing, with billions being poured into finding applications.

It won’t take long to put the two together and have largely automated workforces.

We will 100% see humanoid robots performing manual tasks within 15 years, more likely 5-10.

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It’s a great assistant for may office jobs.

Give it a load of documents and ask it to make summaries or presentations.

Get it to update user guides when minor changes have been made without having to wait for someone to do it, or trawl through the yourself.

Give it a load of data and ask it to look for patterns in it.

It will make getting a job on the first rung of the ladder more difficult as I can ask it to do a lot of the things I would ask an assistant/junior to do much quicker and with my direct input, any time of the day.

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SamVimesBootTheory@reddit

For me personally

There's very little that AI would be of a benefit for in my daily life and I mostly find it a hindrance when I do encounter it and really hate how it's getting harder to like opt out of using it

I'm actually not completely opposed to AI and know of like places where it is very useful but I don't really like how it's been pushed in what feels like an incredibly unethical way and seems to be pushed in a way that feels like it's encouraging people to outsource their brain

Like it feels the way it's being implemented isn't really helping anyone just more 'let's try and outsource the stuff that should be done by people'

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360Saturn@reddit

Pretty much exactly where I land.

Nothing that people actually want actively to use requires to be pushed so heavily and the 'what you can use it for' on ads feel like a parody of themself or aimed at extremely stupid people "use it to write a birthday card to your dad!" etc - like something out of Black Mirror!

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SatinwithLatin@reddit

AI is being shoved down and up every orifice because investors poured millions into it and want their returns. So companies are adding it to our lives whether we want it or not. There's also something to be said for probable data harvesting, after all if you're not paying for it that means you're the product.

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-Xserco-@reddit

They are relying on consumers (mindless morons tbh) believing that AI is sentient. That LLMs are revolutionary and not at all just slowing down progress. That they can cure cancer (they cant even code python, or understand basic medical principles). Or that indeed, we are in the cyberpunk technological future.

It's a scam. Blatantly so.

This is vibeonomics. It's Wolf of Wallstreet. But the leaders are Epstein clients, and Palantir psychopathic terrorists.

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Miltoni@reddit

You're not missing anything.

People have hyped themselves into an almost religion-like belief that we're headed for exponential growth and AI taking over all industries in the next few years. Particularly on Reddit. It doesn't help when the CEOs and execs of these companies never stop hyping it themselves. We constantly have Sam Altman making wild AGI timeline predictions, Jensen Huang and Darius Amodei talking about AI replacing entire job categories within years. The same people who have enormous financial incentives to overclaim things.

The reality is that there's a massive bottleneck that is conveniently ignored: training data.

The internet at this point is largely scraped. What's left is lower quality, increasingly niche, or legally contested. And now there's an even bigger issue. AI-generated content now floods the web, and models are inevitably beginning to train on their own outputs in a huge, contaminated feedback loop. The errors, biases, and hallucinations we often see get laundered into these training sets.

Then you have the issues with specialised domains like medicine. High-quality reliably annotated data is scarce, expensive to produce, and is usually locked behind institutions with no interest in handing it over to a tech company.

The obvious reply here is going to be the use of synthetic data generation. Whether these can fully substitute for genuine data diversity and volume at scale is an open question that no one really comprehensively agrees on.

I say all of this as a massive fan of artificial intelligence and as somehow who has integrated it into pretty much every aspect of my personal and professional life. I just can't see past the inherent limitations of LLMs and believe it'll take a completely new paradigm shift that will ultimately require human ingenuity before we see any real societal disruption caused by AI.

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Delta_Eridani_Bob@reddit

Nothing, you're missing nothing. Is it useful for some jobs. Yes, will it replace some people's jobs. Probably. Does it need to be rammed down everyone's throat because big tech have put billions into it. Fuck no. I don't need bloody copilot AI for gaming. I have literally zero use for Chatgpt. Not even one. I work on farms. Fixing shit that goes wrong. It'll very much unlikely effect me. Will it effect people in call centre rolls when they can be replaced and at being replaced by automated systems. Yes. I feel bad for those people. I can't get annoyed at it though. It would be like getting annoyed at cars because we can walk everywhere or take a horse.

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ErosDarlingAlt@reddit

I would be all for AI if it: - Was sustainable ecologically - Didn't try and pretend to be human and ingratiate itself weirdly by constantly affirming you - Wasn't allowed to train itself using copyrighted material

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Mccobsta@reddit

From my experience with "ai" tools your not missing anything they tend to be more work than just doing something my self

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Ok-Charge-6998@reddit

Well, it gives non-AI users a way of feeling superior to others, as seen in this thread.

Honestly, it depends on your use case, if you can’t think of a good use for it then you’re not missing out on anything. For me, it’s been a massive change in the way I work.

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Life_Court8209@reddit

You're right that the current consumer-facing stuff like chatbots and assistants feels clunky, but the corporate push to recoup those massive investments is a huge part of the noise. For developers, the real game-changer isn't about AGI, it's the insane productivity boost on tedious tasks that frees us up for more complex work. That shift in workflow efficiency is what a lot of the hype is actually about for people using it professionally. The public-facing versions are just the tip of a much more capable, and expensive, iceberg.

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franki-pinks@reddit

I’ve never used it and never will. I don’t use Siri or chat gpt or any of that bollocks. Everything I write is done by me and every picture is unfiltered.

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Brayrut@reddit

I worked in innovation consulting during the “metaverse” and while AI is far more useful, the manufactured pressure to use it in order to offset the colossal and incompetent overspend feels the exact same. In the last month my well known employer as asked everyone to up their usage, and those below daily use age will be penalised.

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slop_drobbler@reddit

Alexa/Siri/home assistants are crap on pretty much all devices. Chat bots which have been around forever still are very basic and circular

Not the same thing as what people are referring to when talking about AI.

The doom mongering is all on the potential of what tech can do.

Yes. If you've used modern LLMs or generative AI and work in certain industries you should be rightfully scared of job security.

Any media based jobs are pretty much at the point where AI can replicate it to a standard that many consumers will find indistinguishable from real human creativity: music, art, website design, graphic design, motion graphics, film, TV, social media influencers...

Any 'rules based' white collar work is also at massive risk, I'd argue even more so than the above. Lawyers, CEOs, programmers, administrators etc etc

My main concern with AI is its ability to mislead. There are massive implications in the information space as propaganda is now much easier to make (actual fake news etc) and is more difficult to identify as fake. Likewise it's even easier for people to claim that something real is actually fake. Anyone that is aware of current world events particularly what's going on with US leadership should be concerned about how easily manipulated the general populace is and how effective propaganda can be

Jobs based around physical labour are safe for now imo

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SheepishSwan@reddit

You won't get a good answer to this question on Reddit.

Which is ironic considering data we share here is sold by Reddit to train ai.

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Plodo99@reddit

It’s fairly evident if you’re entry level or work in: Customer service , ops roles , copywriting , design , etc

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RecentTwo544@reddit

It's not going to replace copywriting or design at a "proper" level anytime soon though.

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But I'm talking about people who design a newsletter and type it up as a small part of their job, perhaps working as an admin worker/secretary for a school or local council or small company. They have loads of other stuff to do so it won't take their job.

If your main and sole role for work is a graphic designer/copywriter, AI is not remotely capable of taking your job.

Hence the downvotes on my replies there.

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Ok_Cow_3431@reddit

I struggle to rationalise how the people who seem to use them or speak about them the most have the least understanding of what they do or how they work.

The number of people who will use publicly available LLMs on a daily basis but have no idea what a hallucination is boggles the mind.

As they currently stand no, GPT models are not a substitute for Google, you always need to check teh answers they give.

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AgeingChopper@reddit

yep! a result that is a "best fit" is not the same as being a correct result. I've been amused how often the answers are outright wrong.

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MikimaruX@reddit

I look at differently to you, yeah it's applications that you mentioned are useful but not groundbreaking, those kinds? I'm actually abit negative towards.

For example my work uses it so instead of looking upnour source material or checking data om a spreadsheet, we ask the AI and it delivers the answer

As someone who is proficient at my job I'm aware of where data and source material is so it's actually quicker for me to do than than use the AI, new employees? It's great.

Where I really enjoy AI is the personal applications it has, thers so many things I couldn't do an would never pay someone to do for me, such as a graphic designer for a logo or cover art for an album or a novel. People who want a professional music mix but aren't willing to pay for someone to do it.

It opens a world letting people with low skill achieve a higher skill level without years of practice or endless amounts of software programs

I didn't get all the fuss till I started using it, first it was just for fun, making my best mate look like a that in photo and sending them to him for a laugh.

Now I use it alot in terms of media, I remember 15 years ago you want to build a website? You'd have a few poor options with the good stuff behind a paywall and have to spend hours researching and looking at popular sites and how and why they are popular and figure out how to recreate it.

Now AI will do all that for you.

Although I do understand its negative impact, even on a personal level, like arguing with it... the one I use doesn't understand depth in pictures, so when I'm trying to create something specific it gets frustrating and will at times completely contradict itself in terms of its answers and why it can and can't do x y or z.

But I'm solely talking about consumer AI here, not the advanced stuff.

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agentorange65@reddit

It's being hyped to us, but for the wrong application

While it could be useful for complex mathematics and science etc, we are using it to ask what the capital of France is, or to create a picture of a penguin vaping while wearing a top hat.

The word recognition based responses are basically vibes based non answers, with no oversight with regards to accuracy

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spinningdice@reddit

It's a bubble, I'm not denying it's useful - but the current cheap/free availability will burst at some point. It costs a fortune to run and just isn't earning companies anything, so it'll either become riddled with ads disguised as results or locked behind an expensive subscription.

Better not to become reliant on it.

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RipCurl69Reddit@reddit

In my experience, it started off as a 'we've levelled up, check this out!' but it quickly spiralled into being a massive downgrade for products which implement it with zero regard to usability or general need for it to be there.

I work in engineering, I do NOT need AI in my current situation. My creative hobbies outside of work also don't need it. I don't use AI at all, and I'm perfectly happy to keep it that way.

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UntappdBeer@reddit

Maybe we can use ai to explore DNA and recreate dinosaurs, that'll be fun. /S

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floatinginmyroom@reddit

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scouse_git@reddit

That's the ideal question to put into an AI bot

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Ricky_Martins_Vagina@reddit

Wait, we don't have flying transportation? Or are we just living in different versions of the Matrix?! 🤨

Regarding AI, your post reads as if you have concluded that "that's it, AI has peaked" and hit is maximum potential already.

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RenderSlaver@reddit

I've recently recruited for a new role, I interviewed three people and two of them had been put out of work because of AI. I have a good friend who's a dev with 20+ years of experience and is now having AI do most of his work and tripped his output. AI is fucking shit up quick.

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DrH1983@reddit

AI can do things a lot quicker but I dislike that as it means I then have to do more stuff.

See, my view of AI is that it should let me do work stuff quicker, giving me more free time to do stuff I actually want to do.

Instead my employers take the view that AI will let colleagues do work stuff quicker, giving them time to do more work stuff.

This just leads me to feeling a bit overwhelmed as things happen so quickly.

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We're barely into the age of AI. Your home assistance example isn't even using LLM models, changing these isn't in the interests of the companies as that's a HUGE expensive on token usage/compute, you can create your own systems that would be 10 fold more akin to something Sci-Fi-esk that you're looking for, the real differences will appear once hardware exists to localise LLM models without it costing $100 per go, hardware advancement is always slower than software, this is why we've seen ginormous investment in factories and server centres from governments and companies across the global, once these things are up and running you'll see the change.

I work in accountancy (both commercial and techincal). AI going to decimate the industry in the next 3-5 years.

Why hire new junior staff when AI can do it cheaper, quicker and better.

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Atompunk78@reddit

What do you mean? You aren’t missing anything, you just underestimate how useful those things are

Doing code and basic admin almost as well as a trained human is revolutionary and is already saving a shitton of time (and laying people off)

What it isn’t (AGI) is irrelevant when talking about what it is here

Also there are other uses beyond those things you mentioned. It’s ok that it’s not useful to you perhaps, but to some people, having an assistant available 24/7 that’s good at everything to a professional level is revolutionary

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TheShakyHandsMan@reddit

It’s definitely got its uses. I’m always getting help for personal projects through ChatGPT.

Reddit probably isn’t the best place to get an impartial view on AI. It’s certainly not popular.

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RecentTwo544@reddit

I'd argue the opposite - Reddit is full of "AI bros" who insist AI can "easily" do loads of things but then when questioned as to how, they cannot give examples and just try to hide people asking by downvoting.

It's proper head-in-the-sand stuff.

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worotan@reddit

You mean you don’t like questions being asked of your superficial preferences, and want to act like it’s unreasonable to ask questions if advertising pitches so you can feel like you’re the informed majority.

Pretty safe guess that you do the same about climate change.

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Rocinante23@reddit

I'm largely against the implementation of GenAI on its current form

I'm always getting help for personal projects through ChatGPT

But this is the only sensible use-case that I've seen for it so far. I have to agree GenAI is really good for this.

What we're seeing is people using these tools to ask things that could either be found on a traditional search engine or reference website and it's using an incredible amount power to do so.

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No-Tone-6853@reddit

It all goes so much further than a battle between freelance artists doing character commissions and those who don't want to pay what their work is worth.

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jlangue@reddit

You missed the thousands of jobs already lost to it because all your reception, call centre, inquiries et al have been replaced by AI bots with no accountability.

This is the future equity companies with no face using AI to extract every penny out of every aspect of your life.

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theegrimrobe@reddit

nothing, its all slop glomming up all the money and futher fucking the populace and the earth

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srogijogi@reddit

It can do much more. If your job is about data processing and/or creation, then you could feel the threat. If your job is about resource consuming repetition of tasks, quite often you could feel the same. Do you have a unique ability to process or "see big picture" in huge data? This ability will be still unique between humans but very common for AI. If your job is about doing something in the real world, with multiple tasks which cannot be done by a robot standing on the floor in one place? You don't have to worry for now and for a nearest future. Do you work for a company for many years? Same. You would be too expensive to replace.

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MrSam52@reddit

I think you’re not understanding how much wider the applications of it will be once they’ve improved further.

Most customer service roles will be replaced by AI chat bots, whilst some of these have existed for a long time now by using various learning models they will soon be as good as human agents. Especially as they pull through responses from human agents as part of their learning to build up a response base.

Wider than that there are already AI law firms out there. A settlement has already been negotiated through one of these and another is taking fees to give guidance on employment disputes.

Essentially any role currently existing that gives advice to the public will likely eventually be replaced by AI agents. Plus the admin roles you’ve mentioned. Recruitment already runs through Ai tools to screen cvs but I imagine that can be scaled up to running full interviews as well.

This will be a massive saving to organisations in cost, but will also lead to widespread job losses and an economic crisis unless a massive retraining program can be done.

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Yeah, price comparison businesses are dead-men-walking.

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bacon_cake@reddit

For example, I get the fact it can compile code easier for software engineers, debug etc

I get it can do basic admin tasks in excel that would previously require those to use formulas

You've really glossed over some big benefits there alone, and your "etc" covers a LOT.

I run a small business and AI is saving us thousands and thousands of pounds and countless hours. Honestly it's the fastest growing technology I have ever seen in my life. I know reddit likes to think that businesses are forcing a round peg into a square hole and that AI has no uses whatsoever but I know I'm not alone in using it so extensively to my benefit. I personally feel any business not at least trying to use it is making a big mistake.

A rough idea of what I've used it for in the last few days:

Bulk product image manipulation - This used to be outsourced and took days and cost a lot. Now it takes moments at less than 10% of the cost.

Re-drafting customer service emails tailored for specific customer types. For example, for a non-technical customer, I can explain the tech solution, get the AI to redraft for someone with a poor IT ability, then rewrite. (Also I can write sweary emails to customers and get a redraft which is quite cathartic).

The other day I wrote a support ticket to our Warehouse Management software supplier because we were having a major difficulty, on a whim I copied the ticket into ChatGPT and it solved the issue for me and we were back online in minutes instead of 24 hours.

I've made simple edits to our website that previously required an agency worker at several hundred pounds a day.

It helped me diagnose and resolve a card stuffing attack on our site.

We have an older colleague who struggles to see the screen and it helped me with new CSS and a Chrome extension so that the images and text are larger.

I use it to sanity check massive CSV imports.

It was/is a disruptive technology and so a LOT of people tried upselling it to everything. Reality is hitting that while LLM's are impressive and can automate many tasks efficiently and allow people to do things quicker, it is ultimately yet another "calculator". The calculator allowed people to do big sums really quickly. It also allowed people to do trig and all sorts. The real "but" moment, is it still relies on the user knowing what they are doing and knowing how to put in appropriate input for appropriate output.

Getting your hands on a calculator that can speed up calculus is great, but if you don't know calculus or what buttons to press it is useless.

Same with LLM's. People are pushing them to do things they weren't designed to do, and while it kind of works in some instances, for most things it falls over.

AGI is so far no closer than it has been for decades.

LLM's are a "what word comes next" blackbox of Bayesian stats. Very cool stuff, and it's original intent was to understand and define how languages work. By using them as tools to do tasks, it is pushing them beyond their design, and while they kind of work, the moment they don't work becomes apparent very fast, and usually with drastic consequences.

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bennyshark@reddit

Its the new google - if previously you would google something, now you should use chatgpt

Very useful for all sorts of things, DIY, interior design, personal health, training, lots of stuff

Try and talk to it as much as you can about anything going on in your life you may be surprised with how beneficial it is

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Backlists@reddit

That depends on what it is that you are asking for.

If it’s something highly specific, then you should not use AI, or at the very least you should ask AI to use their search tool, and provide sources.

Do this enough times and you will notice that what the AI generated is misleading or downright incorrect from the original source. It doesn’t happen every time, or even most of the time, but it’s enough to be unreliable.

To be clear, all those suggestions you mentioned are good example use cases for AI.

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bennyshark@reddit

Yes the AI can be incorrect, even has got a simple addition sum completely wrong in my experience

The sycophancy can be annoying, though you can learn to look past it

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360Saturn@reddit

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AnonymousTimewaster@reddit

Alexa/Siri/home assistants are crap on pretty much all devices.

They dont use AI

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UnacceptableUse@reddit

Google assistant became Gemini which uses LLMs now. It got less useful

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AnonymousTimewaster@reddit

All true.

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TheCotofPika@reddit

I use it for refining my emails to be neutral as the Autism can make me come across as blunt.

I also use DeepSeek to help with research as it can go and view websites which I can then go and read myself as I don't trust it to give me the most accurate information.

If I am sick and can't function, I ask it to help me plan a day where I can care for 4 children without making myself worse.

I have also used it as behaviour prediction for a family member who is prone to unstable actions. It has so far accurately predicted what they will do which is helpful to prepare for.

It also will interpret, with sources, things like bloodwork results which I find helpful.

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Grouchy-Seaweed-1934@reddit

I'm from the software development world and I think we are 6-12 moths (At least), ahead of the wider job market in it's implementation.

We can see what's comming, most people can't yet.

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LowAnimator8770@reddit

CEO’s spent millions buying licenses, they demand results regardless of how useful it actually is.

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mmoonbelly@reddit

Because they’re not worried about the cost of technology, they’re worried about the reputational cost of being seen to be behind their competitors to the finance analysts which depresses the share price and increases their cost of capital.

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LowAnimator8770@reddit

It’s 100% Investors expecting returns

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Cheap-Rate-8996@reddit

You're not missing anything. The situation really is that silly.

AI is currently the basis for the largest financial bubble in history, and yet (outside of a handful of very specific applications in medicine), it doesn't do much of anything. Investors, politicians, the 'adults in the room' were just this impressed by a text generator.

How did you first use ChatGPT? 90% of people asked it a stupid question like "How would The Graduate be a different movie if Dustin Hoffman's character was played by Grimace?" and then giggled when it gave you a serious response. Have you done anything more profound with it than that since? Has the novelty of that worn off for you yet?

Unless you have bad intentions (having it do an assignment for you) or are fundamentally misusing it in a dangerous way (talking to it instead of consulting a therapist), what we have left is a product that's fun to dick around with every once in a while.

It's not the printing press, or the car, or even the Internet. It is not a society-transforming innovation if we limit the scope of its use to 'desirable' applications. We're inserting it into everything because we're trying to intellectually justify why we should care about this beyond the initial novelty of a program you can have a convincing facsimile of a conversation with. But we haven't. Our global cultural response to AI is completely and utterly out of proportion to what it actually does.

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21Shells@reddit

You're not missing much, the use cases are so incredibly niche compared to what its being marketed as. I think it'll be useful for programming, but creatively its being rejected completely.

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Hopeful-Climate-3848@reddit

For coding it speeds things up, but you still have to know what you don't know.

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The thing is most jobs have a huge part of repetitive tasks that AI can automate already. A bit like 3d printing sped up prototyping considerably, AI can speed up lots of office tasks and reduce overhead. But it is also extremely expensive to run and the main companies are throwing hundreds of billions into it, with huge losses, to drive adoption. It’s not sustainable on the long run.

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-intellectualidiot@reddit

I think there’s a big difference between using AI to avoid doing work (which is all anyone ever talks about) and using it as an assistant to improve work you’ve already done. The output for the former use can be quite sloppy and unimpressive, but if you’re already showing it human produced work as a starting point you force it to critically evaluate, which you can do yourself, but I’ve found that using AI is a great way to jump start that whole process, especially if you struggle with task initiation like me.

It’s great at helping me phrase stuff slightly better and more accurately, fact checking, and making suggestions for other things I’ve missed and should consider. You obviously have to be very careful, prompt it to be brutally honest, and not trust it blindly, but it works as pretty great assistant and time saver. It’s also great at answering clarifying questions I might have that I’d simply be too embarrassed to ask a human, again obviously you need to be careful and always fact check from another source to see if it checks out, but its a great jump start.

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NoisyGog@reddit

Alexa/Siri/home assistants are crap on pretty much all devices.

Those are not the current state of AI, at all.

Chat bots which have been around forever still are very basic and circular

Chat GPT and its ilk really are in a different breed to the “chat bots” that came before. I’d argue they’re not intelligent in the way we normally hear that word, but you can absolutely chat to one without circularity - they really do feel quite natural.

For me, the biggest thing about the current LLMs is the possibility that you could read (and create) online content in any language at all, which gives minority languages a huge step up, as the need to automatically default to some other lingua Franca really dissolves.
Nobody seems to have jumped on that yet though, I guess there’s less money in it than whatever the fuck LLMs are being used for right now.

In other fields, it’s been transformational, gene splicing, chip design, and various other sciences have benefited from specialist AI applications.

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It's very useful and helpful for some things and absolutely awful at others. The problem is that the people in charge can't really tell the difference, particularly as most AI is built to give a plausible or good looking answer, not the right one.

So helping with coding, yes its fantastic. Still absolutely needs human oversight and checking but it really helps.

But to use OPs example, do not EVER trust it with excel or doing anything where it processes numbers itself. Helping make some formulas, sure, but do not ask it to actually do any crunching of info. It WILL mess it up and it WILL make stuff up.

I think people are being naive if they want to pretend it'll go away or that it's just a fad, but people are being just as naive to think it's going to be able to replace huge numbers of jobs or lead to crazy improvements in productivity. It's not all hype, but it is a lot hype.

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TheHeroYouNeed247@reddit

"Chat bots have been around forever" is a very reductive statement.

LLMs, while not AGI, are far more advanced than the chat bots of 90s/00s.

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RegretEasy8846@reddit

About 500 seconds using it instead of Google a day, if you’re me.

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The_Final_Barse@reddit

If you don't have much use for it, yeah you might be missing the hype.

But it's a bit like my mum in the 90s saying she doesn't see the point in the internet.

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AromaticVacation3077@reddit

Remind me, what is the point of the internet again?

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parasoralophus@reddit

Your mum kinda had a point TBH.

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HardAtWorkISwear@reddit

I've been using it to code an arduino project for the last few months and it absolutely cannot debug. It very confidentaly told me to do things a certain within the code, which I did. The outcome was close to what I was after but needed tweaking so I described the issue and it responded by basically calling me thick for doing it the way it just told me to do it.
I had other issues I tried to use it to debug and the solution it gave was identical to the code I'd just given it with the issue inside, but with different comments.
AI is just a glorified search engine and people seem to forget that.

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slimboyslim9@reddit

I’ve been quite sceptical about it all but my work has encouraged us to give it a go and get fluent with writing good prompts. So I tried using copilot to help solve a software issue on my PC. It seemed to be helping but I had to restart the PC a few times in the process (standard) and copilot needed to be told all over again each time on what we were doing (because I refused to create an account and save my history/hand over my data).

Twice started to get irritating, three times got more annoying, the fourth time I caught it up and it gave me completely conflicting advice on what to do, from the previous three restarts.

So I gave up on copilot and asked a colleague in IT for advice.

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Anubis1958@reddit

Its not just about writing computer code.

I used AI to

Write a legal contract
Write an objection to a planning application
Help build a web page
Manipulate an image
even help me write a witty haiku for a birthday card.

As for jobs going, then yes: some jobs will go. It is an industrial revolution. But other jobs will arise. Poor programmers (and there a lot of these!) will go. But senior developers who understand how to use AI will be in high demand.

And we are NOT talking abour Siri or Alexa!

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latrappe@reddit

I've built a whole home server stack of tools using AI for help with the various files, using docker and Linux and things. I work in IT but I'm not a programmer so it has helped me achieve loads.

Also much more simple things like "Hey I've got some frozen chicken fillets to use up and I'm bored with the regular meals, gimme 5 interesting ideas from around the world. Brilliant, now expand option 4 to a full recipe for me". Much faster than trawling bullshit recipe sites. Has legit enhanced what we eat at home. We save the ones we like in a recipe app.

Then there's the general search aggregation it does. Yes you need to check its sources if it is important, but it's a one hit plain English way to ask a question and get an answer. Without needing to browse multiple sites. You can also "discuss" the answer by asking more questions in a way you can't with regular search.

We use a lot for trip planning. Yes, you dial in your plans more manually afterwards, but LLMs are great for getting you from "I know nothing and there's too much info" to "right I've a good grasp now".

If you're IT inclined you can install a model locally on your server and point it at your music or movie collection or files and databases and have it query your data for you in a locally ringfenced and private environment.

Finally I'd say to get out what you put in. So spend a little time thinking about how you prompt it. For example things like use only academic publications, do not average out results and cite your sources as you go along. That gets you a way different answer to "are vaccines safe?" than just asking the question straight.

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doublemp@reddit

I've used it for travel itinerary generation, tax/pension optimisation, to take a screenshot of what's in the cupboard and tell me what to cook, to troubleshoot baking failures, research and compare cameras, phones and even employers, to help me understand fairly complicated concepts, to calculate my life expectancy, research party policies, narrow down a list of possible baby names, get legal advice (obvs. double check everything), and even decode best before dates on veg packets!

Generally it's just one of those things that it would take you a while to to Google and research, and it can now be done in seconds.

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Direct_Highlight_118@reddit

It doesn't matter how good it is so long as companies think it's good enough to cut jobs

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rdu3y6@reddit

A lot are just using AI as the current excuse for cutting jobs to look better to investors when they're either actually struggling or just want to fire people to reduce payroll.

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gregofdeath@reddit

Much like the whole thing with 3D TVs, The Metaverse, NFTs, et al., companies have put so much money into AI that they simply can't allow it to fail. There's 'hype' because companies have paid enough money to create 'hype'.

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romeo__golf@reddit

I'm not an expert and I'm sure someone will explain it better than this, but what the general public see as AI (Chat GPT, Claude, image generation etc) is just the tip of the iceberg.

The true value is in science and engineering. Things like AI being trained to spot cancers quicker and earlier than doctors can, or being able to analyse data more thoroughly than a human.

Image generation is definitely part of the appeal. It doesn't mean it will replace VFX artists, but it might be a tool they use to improve their work. AI generated video doesn't just appear because someone wrote a simple prompt; the best ones are created by experts familiar with the field, who know which techniques to use and how to refine the output.

An analogy would be asking Chat GPT to write an essay on a subject you don't understand, against a professor of the topic using the tool to create a framework for their own essay, and then being able to edit, refine, and perfect the final product using their decades of knowledge and experience.

I've no doubt there was doom-mongering among the farriers when the internal combustion engine was invented, but these days we would never suggest selling the family car and buying a horse to save them.

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Relevant_Natural3471@reddit

The mrs was watching 'Care' the other day, with Sheridan Smith. I did say that perhaps AI could help translate for stroke victims with Aphasia

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Actual-Morning110@reddit

Recent example of Oracle layoff to save money and channel it towards seup of AI servers/factory is the prime example. Don't matter the specific reason, but it is becuase of the AI.

Good Engineer with AI is equivalent to 10 average engineer. So, less jobs.

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Time_Entertainer_319@reddit

What you’re missing is the assumption that we need AGI before AI can have massive, cascading effects.

We don’t.

The truth is, many things we once believed required high-level intelligence; speech, language, coherent conversation, have already been replicated by machines.

It doesn’t matter that AI isn’t truly “thinking.” It doesn’t matter that it isn’t conscious.

What matters is that it can act.

Modern AI systems can execute complex tasks autonomously, based on patterns and behaviors that emerge from vast amounts of training data. They’ve been trained on huge portions of the internet to mimic how humans think and behave. As a result, they can reproduce behaviors we don’t fully understand ourselves.

And that’s the key point:

You don’t need AGI for AI to be disruptive, or even dangerous.

What exists today is already powerful enough. Given sufficient access, permissions, and the ability to act in the real world, current AI systems can cause serious harm.

People get stuck on technicalities. “It doesn’t think.” “It isn’t conscious.”

But none of that is required for something to be impactful or destructive.

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Vast-Faithlessness85@reddit

The problem is most people's understanding of AI is just the LLM they interact with on their phone.
Research machine learning, deep learning and then think about what this will mean for robotics. Following that you may start to understand the threat to jobs and society as a whole.

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starsandshards@reddit

I hate using it because of the implications BUT as someone with ADHD and other issues, it really helps me in my job when I struggle with communication or other things. I wish I didn't have to use it but stuff like goblin.tools is a godsend to me when I can't function. I try very hard not to rely on it, though. It's always a last resort. That means I'm not a terrible human, right...?

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Kian-Tremayne@reddit

It can do tasks that we currently need a human being to do. For software engineers it doesn’t just “compile code faster” - it will create code for you (well, it’ll cobble something together from other people’s code but that’s what most software engineers do most of the time).

It’s not reliable enough to do these tasks unsupervised though. AI is like having a bright, enthusiastic and sometimes utterly clueless junior working for you. As long as you’re careful about what you ask that junior to do, and check their work, it’s a great force multiplier. And it means that even entry level jobs are going to be more like being a team leader for a bunch of AIs in future.

The danger is where people don’t realise that supervision is needed. Employers doing that will get in the same mess as if they hired a load of junior engineers and no seniors or designers. And employees who think they can get their job done by just “asking ChatGPT” and then play World of Warcraft all day are in for a nasty shock when their boss decides that if he’s OK with getting lazy, sloppy results he can just ask ChatGPT himself and save on payroll.

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HawaiianSnow_@reddit

I think AI takes many forms and has many uses. Most people (like myself) who use Chat GPT or Copilot or anything else will have fairly simple uses for it.

E.g. "Copilot, replicate last months sales report but with this month's sales figures . Suggest some key takeaways or highlight things that need further investigation" – can do a days worth of work in a minute. Then my job becomes reviewing and checking the output before finalising the report and presenting it over to whoever needs to see it.

Another example: "ChatGPT, im travelling to X city. I'd like to see A,B and C when im there. I arrive on Monday and leave on Wednesday – suggest an itinerary" helps with planning a trip, saving potentially hours.

In other areas, businesses have massive AI models that allow them to predict weather patterns, or investment patterns, or run 10 million scenarios for potential side effects from a new drug in a matter of minutes. We (the general public) do not have access to these tools and they serve a bespoke purpose.

Ultimately, like any other bit of tech, AI is a tool. It saves time and enables innovation. It's not the answer to everything and (probably) won't solve some of the world's biggest problems but it is incredibly useful and in my opinion will help to propel humanity forward in the same way as the steam engine did, or the car did, or germ theory did.

Don't believe the hype but don't believe the doom. The answer is somewhere in-between.

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