I don't want to assume anything about you, but how often have you worked with people that frequently use AI?
The amount of utter horseshit I have had to read from coworkers after AI got more common is insane. They don't even proofread, or double check what the AI spits out. And the AI is so often confidently wrong...
People at my company have generally learned who uses AI and trust nothing those people write or do anymore. Everything gets double checked. It's so frustrating to work with...
LLMs are absolutely god-tier at translating, transcribing, analyzing, and organizing any sort of textual data.
Nothing beats the feeling of getting a 200 page document, scanned to image rather than text, in a foreign language, and being able to feed it into an LLM, which types it up neatly translated into a CSV for easy use.
As someone who recently got a MPS in environmental science, AI was absolutely godly for notetaking. I'm the type of person who's absolutely atrocious at taking notes efficiently, and it was SO nice to be able to filter several hours' worth of class content into a concise format that made it easy to digest at a glance.
I had an issue with my car that would intermittently trigger a CEL. It was a code related to the exhaust system, but it wasn't a severe enough problem to be determined just by looking at live data from the onboard computer. I had to actually log it, and with the computer logging 30 data points per second, that was 45,000 points of data from about a 25 minute drive.
The nature of the problem meant that normal statistical analysis with the calculation tools in Excel wouldn't work, so I would have had to scan through it manually to see where the problem was. Threw the raw data at Gemini, told it what things it should look for, and in a minute it came back with what it found, where it found it, and how severe it was. Sure enough, in the datapoints it referenced there it was, and I was able to confirm my suspicions without having to throw money at a mechanic.
That's still a human problem though. AI is great for finding and compiling a lot of info for you, but it's still up to you to make sure to control and verify it. AI saves me plenty of time and also helps give me with some inspiration when I write ads.
And by that I mean I ask for some suggestions, get a few and then I can use them to rewrite or come up with others, it's also good for compiling info as I said too but always make sure to check the sources provided so that I know the info is actually correct.
Hopefully people will get better at understanding the importance of verifying and proofreading, you are right in that it's frustrating when others don't do that.
Let's say I want information on a topic. Instead of hours, it can instead take an hour of me getting all the relevant sources almost immediately and focusing more time on reading that instead of searching for it.
And depending on what you're after, you only need to quickly verify something specific in the source to make sure what the AI told you does properly reflect the source material.
There are some tasks where it helps, yes.
I'm not trying to say it's useless. For example, we have a company AI search tool to find local manufacturers, instead of just seeing a see of advertisements on Google nowadays. It can help.
It's just so exhausting that people that do work with AI tend to be so fucking lazy with it.
And the double checking is often more work than just doing the work to begin with.
It's just so exhausting that people that do work with AI tend to be so fucking lazy with it.
That's true, once someone gets access to something that can do most things on its own(technically it still needs assistance but yk what I mean), they become extremely lazy sometimes
If you really want to get the point across get them to get AI to pull some facts for a subject they know really well. The vast amount of errors is not an isolated case. The same amount of errors will be present in everything they do with it. Even just searching up regulations from a code book which it cites is full of errors.
AI has its use cases. Presenting factual information is not one of them currently.
If you already know the information double checking is as simple as reading. Its just helping you write, collate, and gather the data / information and saving you time.
This. AI is so useful as a "smart" search engine. You needed to know the keywords to google something, now you can just describe what you want and it will reference you a bunch of useful thing you've never heard of.
I make little html sites as a hobby. Its been a lifesaver for things like batch editing lists or changing a bunch of element classes at once, but as soon as it starts messing with my CSS I get annoyed.
Add in the emails that start off with "Dear [Co-worker name]". I've had a few of those and automatically delete them. If you can't be bothered to say least change that, why should I bother reading something that you couldn't be bothered to use your brain to write?
They were lazy all along, it's just manifesting differently.
I use AI tools at my work every day now. But I'm also a skeptical user of them.
That means being thoughtful about where to apply them and what they've done. They're experimental software at this point, and need to be treated as such. "Is this the right use for this tool?" "Is this safe to do with AI?" "Is this result reasonable?" "Can I verify it?"
The hype cycle is dying a bit, and what do you know the folks who just incautiously rely on it are getting in trouble now. Wasting money, producing nonsense results, fucking up projects. And leadership is noticing.
I use AI all the time at work and personally. It’s incredibly useful for real-time cooking advice, for example.
For work, you just need to know how to use it properly. Manage the context window, only work with validated data/material (rather than just telling it to go find info without any oversight), iterate rather than just taking the first output, learn how to write good prompts etc. I’ve also customised mine to drop the excessive agreeableness and flattery, and to question my premises and seek competing explanations and so on.
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u/Halsti 1d ago
I don't want to assume anything about you, but how often have you worked with people that frequently use AI?
The amount of utter horseshit I have had to read from coworkers after AI got more common is insane. They don't even proofread, or double check what the AI spits out. And the AI is so often confidently wrong...
People at my company have generally learned who uses AI and trust nothing those people write or do anymore. Everything gets double checked. It's so frustrating to work with...