AI Tire Kicking

[btq96r]

Would love to hear what everyone is seeing, and more importantly doing with AI in their personal and professional lives.  I got to see a few of the apps my company had plugged into radiology systems for the docs doing the reads, and some are pretty useful.  The technology is growing for sure.  

I  have a ChatGPT plus subscription, and I was really using it to do a lot of advanced Excel formulas and research before I left my job.   Now I'm using it for job searching, and to tweak my resume/cover letter with each application.  I'd love to see what it can do with large data sets someday, and am interested in how it can be used as plug-ins with things I don't have a lot of familiarity with.  I'm also trying things here and there with Google's Gemini, and X's Grok.  I'm pretty impressed with the recent upgrades to Grok.  Haven't tried Anthropic's offering yet.

So, who on here is using any AI tools? 

Edited March 19 by btq96r

[Chucktshoes]

I avoid it at all costs. I turn it off whenever possible when it’s added to an app that I use. Have deleted a few altogether for doing so. It’s proliferation pushes me closer everyday to getting rid of my smartphone altogether. 

Edited Thursday at 03:59 PM by Chucktshoes

[Garufa]

I will go far as to say #### AI.  We have thousands of years of knowledge available to a global populace that is increasing becoming dumber.  How is embracing what is basically Skynet going to improve the human condition?

When people don’t have to think or work anymore who’s going to pay the bills?  Who is going to ensure quality, and most importantly, accurate service?

I could go on quite a bit, but “consumer grade” AI is crap.  When I search Google for something like I do every single day for work, I want accurate results.  I don’t get that and just skip past it to do proper research like intelligent people do.

 

Edited March 20 by Garufa

[papa61]

I can't recall what pops up when using search at work, but I have found it semi useful. It is often short on details at this point but to be fair the data I search for is scattered and scarce. So far this week I have found out more about the history of Freightliner Trucks than I wanted to know but still short of exact details on the model I was searching.

[Johnny Rotten]

43 minutes ago, Garufa said:

I will go far as to say #### AI.  We have thousands of years of knowledge available to a global populace that is increasing becoming dumber.  How is embracing what is basically Skynet going to improve the human condition?

When people don’t have to think or work anymore who’s going to pay the bills?  Who is going to ensure quality, and most importantly, accurate service?

I could go on quite a bit, but “consumer grade” AI is crap.  When I search Google for something like I do every single day for work, I want accurate results.  I don’t get that and just skip past it to do proper research like intelligent people do.

 

[Darrell]

I'm enthusiastic about AI. Now, I don't believe one should depend upon it but it is a good way to get started on research. I imagine there were plenty of people who pooh-poohed the internet when it began, thinking that the good old library card category was the right tool for research. I still love the library, but.....

AI is going to get better and it's going to help us tremendously. I think that medical diagnostics is going to be among the most important uses of AI, and I'm conviced that there will be new fields that open up that I can't imagine today

[Grayfox54]

AI seems to be advancing natural stupidity. 

[10-Ring]

There are always naysayers, just worth the horseless carriage, telephone, and home computer. I have to ask the reason for those not wanting to use it? Gave you researched it, or do you just not like it because it's new?

Personally, I use AI almost daily. I've found it extremely useful for complex excel formulas, one in particular Chat GPT churned out in seconds what would have taken me days to accomplish. I've also used it to write policies. More and more I'm using it as a search engine. I'm my experience Chat GPT has worked much better as a search engine than Google. 

[10-Ring]

Friday at work I used AI to write a particular training program from me. We aren't to the point that it produces a polished finished product in the format that I need, but it churned out a nice outline that needed minimum polishing and I was able to copy and paste a good deal of the material into PPT. I find this especially useful for double checking that I haven't forgotten tidbits of information that should have been included. This task alone, AI saved me several hours had I just built the same program from scratch on my on.

On another project, I had been asked to produce a SOP for a project that I've been working on. I was basically able to copy and paste from an email that had most of the important details of the project with instructions to "write a SOP on this material". Once again, it took me a few minutes to polish it up, but probably saved me a couple of hours had I just generated the document on my own. 

So AI saved me at least 5-6 hours in one work day. Honestly, I'm pretty overwhelmed by my workload most of the time. I'm not sure how I would keep my head above the water without AI. I use it on more projects than not. 

Edited Sunday at 02:25 AM by 10-Ring

[DraxTheDad]

We are not allowed to use it at my work, mostly because we do government work and some of it is secret / top secret and they don’t want us putting anything into any system where it could be a violation of our security clearances.   That being said, I find it very useful for my daily life when writing letters and even posts.   it does a decent job making things more engaging, or entertaining.   When I write code for myself, I find it super useful.   As someone else mentioned, writing excel formulas is great; or C++ code to position objects in 3D space at the end of a vector, or a JAVA script to record audio in Unix and process it to see if it matches a given audio sample.   It just works phenomenally well for these things.

[peejman]

It depends heavily on the topic. Some topics it's shockingly accurate, some it's woefully misleading. 

Its a lot like auto-correct.  You've got to have a good BS filter and proofread thoroughly. 

As mentioned, a lot of computer programmers should be are worried about their future. 

[Erich]

Some opinions from when @10-Ring posed a similar question.  

I use it at work, it great for coding and editing work. It has a place and can be a huge timesaver. But the cost is total loss of privacy.

Outside work, I use it for various searches. It is the ultimate aggregator and tends to return ‘answers’ versus ‘oh, are you interested in buying this?’ (lots of amazon results) as search engines have steadily moved to a major of monetized results.

No more going thru pages of links, it crunches 100’s of basic google results weeding out the 95% of ad results to get to info /  pertinent links in seconds.

For this purpose I have a ‘public use’ laptop with Win 11, the ultimate expression of control and spying handed over to MS. I use it for things I am ok exposing to Alphabet / MS /Amazon / Apple and .gov.

I avoid AI on my desktop and try to avoid them on my mobile. I remove installations that use it, such removing Copilot from Win 10 when the prying eyes at MS threw that in recently. 

I already stopped taking pictures of anything I don’t want Apple to see with my mobile. I’ve never used cloud, but it’s become obvious that Apple re-engineered it’s CSAM spy engine and pushed it out in pieces. They claim it’s on devic but they’ve done clever things with spreading various permissions so that they can use AI to scan and categorize pictures and sending “encrypted metadata” back to the mothership.

With AI being infused into all newer mainstream OS’s, I am looking at moving to Linux and staying with older mobile devices for personal use.  But as I struggle to stay on top of how clever Apple is getting at hiding things, I am looking at taking a similar approach with a second dumb mobile. 

So long way to say…. it’s a love and hate relationship. I love the time savings and leveraging it for things it dress well, but hate it’s clear abuses and what goes on behind the scenes.

 

 

[10-Ring]

2 hours ago, Erich said:

Some opinions from when @10-Ring posed a similar question.  

I use it at work, it great for coding and editing work. It has a place and can be a huge timesaver. But the cost is total loss of privacy.

Outside work, I use it for various searches. It is the ultimate aggregator and tends to return ‘answers’ versus ‘oh, are you interested in buying this?’ (lots of amazon results) as search engines have steadily moved to a major of monetized results.

No more going thru pages of links, it crunches 100’s of basic google results weeding out the 95% of ad results to get to info /  pertinent links in seconds.

For this purpose I have a ‘public use’ laptop with Win 11, the ultimate expression of control and spying handed over to MS. I use it for things I am ok exposing to Alphabet / MS /Amazon / Apple and .gov.

I avoid AI on my desktop and try to avoid them on my mobile. I remove installations that use it, such removing Copilot from Win 10 when the prying eyes at MS threw that in recently. 

I already stopped taking pictures of anything I don’t want Apple to see with my mobile. I’ve never used cloud, but it’s become obvious that Apple re-engineered it’s CSAM spy engine and pushed it out in pieces. They claim it’s on devic but they’ve done clever things with spreading various permissions so that they can use AI to scan and categorize pictures and sending “encrypted metadata” back to the mothership.

With AI being infused into all newer mainstream OS’s, I am looking at moving to Linux and staying with older mobile devices for personal use.  But as I struggle to stay on top of how clever Apple is getting at hiding things, I am looking at taking a similar approach with a second dumb mobile. 

So long way to say…. it’s a love and hate relationship. I love the time savings and leveraging it for things it dress well, but hate it’s clear abuses and what goes on behind the scenes.

 

 

As far as using it for a search engine, Google would be like asking a crackhead for directions, while AI would be like asking a friendly police officer. 

I get the privacy thing, I'm not worried about it in the least for work purposes. My employer encourages us to use it and I'm not doing anything that's sensitive. Basically, developing training programs that every decent size company has or should have, which basically meant that AI produces a program for me based on a bunch of other stuff that's floating around out there and then I tailor it to be specific to our company. As for Excel, I use one worksheet to track progress across the company and have various formulas within that worksheet. At least one of them i would never have been able to write on my own.