Ask Lemmy

Other than endless posts from the general public telling us how amazing it is, peppered with decision makers using it to replace staff and then the subsequent news reports how it told us that we should eat rocks, or some variation thereof, there's been no impact whatsoever in my personal life.

In my professional life as an ICT person with over 40 years experience, it's helped me identify which people understand what it is and more specifically, what it isn't, intelligent, and respond accordingly.

The sooner the AI bubble bursts, the better.

As a software developer, the one usecase where it has been really useful for me is analyzing long and complex error logs and finding possible causes of the error. Getting it to write code sometimes works okay-ish, but more often than not it's pretty crap. I don't see any use for it in my personal life.

I think its influence is negative overall. Right now it might be useful for programming questions, but that's only the case because it's fed with Human-generated content from sites like Stackoverflow. Now those sites are slowly dying out due to people using ChatGPT and this will have the inverse effect that in the future, AI will have less useful training data which means it'll become less useful for future problems, while having effectively killed those useful sites in the process.

Looking outside of my work bubble, its effect on academia and learning seems pretty devastating. People can now cheat themselves towards a diploma with ease. We might face a significant erosion of knowledge and talent with the next generation of scientists.

AI has completely killed my desire to teach writing at the community college level.

It cost me my job (partially). My old boss swallowed the AI pill hard and wanted everything we did to go through GPT. It was ridiculous and made it so things that would normally take me 30 seconds now took 5-10 minutes of "prompt engineering". I went along with it for a while but after a few weeks I gave up and stopped using it. When boss asked why I told her it was a waste of time and disingenuous to our customers to have GPT sanitize everything. I continued to refuse to use it (it was optional) and my work never suffered. In fact some of our customers specifically started going through me because they couldn't stand dealing with the obvious AI slop my manager was shoveling down their throat. This pissed off my manager hard core but she couldn't really say anything without admitting she may be wrong about GPT, so she just ostracized me and then fired me a few months later for "attitude problems".

For work, I teach philosophy.

The impact there has been overwhelmingly negative. Plagiarism is more common, student writing is worse, and I need to continually explain to people at an AI essay just isn’t their work.

Then there’s the way admin seem to be in love with it, since many of them are convinced that every student needs to use the LLMs in order to find a career after graduation. I also think some of the administrators I know have essentially automated their own jobs. Everything they write sounds like GPT.

As for my personal life, I don’t use AI for anything. It feels gross to give anything I’d use it for over to someone else’s computer.

Impact?

My company sells services to companies trying to implement it. I have a job due to this.

Actual use of it? Just wasted time. The verifiable answers are wrong, the unverifiable answers don't get me anywhere on my projects.

My last job was making training/reference manuals. Management started pushing ChatGPT as a way to increase our productivity and forced us all to incorporate AI tools. I immediately began to notice my coworkers' work decline in quality with all sorts of bizarre phrasings and instructions that were outright wrong. They weren't even checking the shit before sending it out. Part of my job was to review and critique their work and I started having to send way more back than before. I tried it out but found that it took more time to fix all of its mistakes than just write it myself so I continued to work with my brain instead. The only thing I used AI for was when I had to make videos with narration. I have a bad stutter that made voiceover hard so elevenlabs voices ended up narrating my last few videos before I quit.

I used it once to write a proclamation for work and what it spit out was mediocre. I ended up having to rewrite most of it. Now that I'm aware of how many resources AI uses, I refuse to use it, period. What it produces is in no way a good trade for what it costs.

it works okay as a fuzzy search over documentation.
...as long as you're willing to wait.
...and the documentation is freely available.
...and doesn't contain any sensitive information.
...and you very specifically ask it for page references and ignore everything else it says.

so basically, it's worse than just searching for one word and pressing "next" over and over, unless you don't know what the word is.

I worked for a company that did not govern AI use. It was used for a year before they were bought.

I stopped reading emails because they were absolute AI generated garbage.

Clients started to complain and one even left because they felt they were no longer a priority for the company. they were our 5th largest client that had a MRR of $300k+

they still did nothing to curb AI use.

they then reduced the workforce in the call center because they implemented an AI chat bot and began to funnel all incidents through it first before giving a phone number to call.

company was then acquired a year ago. new administration banned all AI usage under security and compliance guidelines.

today, new company hired about 20 new call center support staff. Customers are now happy. I can read my emails again because they contain human competent thought with industry jargon and not some generated thesaurus.

overall, I would say banning AI was the right choice.

IMO, AI is not being used in the most effective ways and causes too much chaos. cryptobros are pushing AI to an early grave because all they want is a cash cow to replace crypto.

ChatGPT has had absolutely zero impact on my work or personal life. I do not have any useful case for it whatsoever. I have used it for goofs before. That's about it. I cannot see it as a positive or negative influence...as it has had zero influence. I do get annoyed that every company and their mother is peddling worthless AI shit that most people have no use case for.

I cannot come up with a use-case for ChatGPT in my personal life, so no impact there.

For work it was a game-changer. No longer do I need to come up with haiku's to announce it is release-freeze day, I just let ChatGPT crap one out so we can all have a laugh at its lack of poetic talent.

I've tried it now and then for some programming related questions, but I found its solutions dubious at best.

I work in an office providing customer support for a small pet food manufacturer. I assist customers over the phone, email, and a live chat function on our website. So many people assume I'm AI in chat, which makes sense. A surprising number think I'm a bot when they call in, because I guess my voice sounds like a recording.

Most of the time it's just a funny moment at the start of our interaction, but especially in chat, people can be downright nasty. I can't believe the abuse people hurl out when they assume it's not an actual human on the other end. When I reply in a way that is polite, but makes it clear a person is interacting with them, I have never gotten a response back.

It's not a huge deal, but it still sucks to read the nasty shit people say. I can also understand people's exhaustion with being forced to deal with robots from my own experiences when I've needed support as a customer. I also get feedback every day from people thankful to be able to call or write in and get an actual person listening to and helping them. If we want to continue having services like this, we need to make sure we're treating the people offering them decently so they want to continue offering that to us.

Searching the internet for information about... well anything has become infuriating. I'm glad that most search engines have a time range setting.

I manage a software engineering group for an aerospace company, so early on I had to have a discussion with the team about acceptable and non-acceptable uses of an LLM. A lot of what we do is human rated (human lives depend on it), so we have to be careful. Also, it's a hard no on putting anything controlled or proprietary in a public LLM (the company now has one in-house).

You can't put trust into an LLM because they get things wrong. Anything that comes out of one has to be fully reviewed and understood. They can be useful for suggesting test cases or coming up with wording for things. I've had employees use it to come up with an algorithm or find an error, but I think it's risky to have one generate large pieces of code.

For my life, it's nothing more than parlor tricks. I like looking at the AI images or whipping one up for a joke in the chat, but of all the uses I've seen, not one of them has been "everyday useful" to me.

I have a gloriously reduced monthly subscription footprint and application footprint because of all the motherfuckers that tied ChatGPT or other AI into their garbage and updated their terms to say they were going to scan my private data with AI.

And, even if they pull it, I don't think I'll ever go back. No more cloud drives, no more 'apps'. Webpages and local files on a file share I own and host.

i've used it fairly consistently for the last year or so. i didn't actually start using it until chatgpt 4 and when openai offered the $20 membership

i think AI is a tool. like any other tool, your results vary depending on how you use it

i think it's really useful for specific intents

example, as a fancy search engine. yesterday I was watching Annie from 1999 with my girlfriend and I was curious about the capitalist character. i asked chatgpt the following question

in the 1999 hit movie annie, who was the billionaire mr warbucks supposed to represent? were there actually any billionaires in the time period? it's based around the early 1930s

it gave me context. it showed examples of the types of capitalist the character was based on. and it informed me that the first billionaire was in 1916.

very useful for this type of inquiry.

other things i like using it for are to help coding. but there's a huge caveat here. some thing it's very helpful for... and some things it's abysmal for.

for example i can't ask it "can you help me write a nice animation for a react native component used reanimated"

because the response will be awful and won't work. and you could go back and forth with it forever and it won't make a difference. the reason is it's trained on a lot of stuff that's outdated so it'll keep giving you code that maybe would have worked 4 years ago. and even then, it can't hold too much context so complex applications just won't work

BUT certain things it's really good. for example I need to write a script for work. i use fish shell but sometimes i don't know the proper syntax or everything fish is capable of

so I ask

how to test, using fish, if an "images.zip" file exists in $target_dir

it'll pump out

if test -f "$target_dir/images.zip"
    echo "File exists."
else
    echo "File does not exist."
end

which gives me what i needed in order to place it into the script i was writing.

or for example if you want to convert a bash script to a fish script (or vice versa), it'll do a great job

so tldr:

it's a tool. it's how you use it. i've used it a lot. i find great value in it. but you must be realistic about its limitations. it's not as great as people say- it's a fancy search engine. it's also not as bad as people say.

as for whether it's good or bad for society, i think good. or at least will be good eventually. was the search engine a bad thing for society? i think being able to look up stuff whenever you want is a good thing. of course you could make the argument kids don't go to libraries anymore.. and maybe that's sorta bad. but i think the trade-off is definitely worth it

It is getting more present at work every day, I keep having to hear even seniors how they "discussed" something with chatgpt or how they will ask it for help. Had to resolve some issue with devops a while back and they just kept pasting errors into chatgpt and trying out whatever it spewed back, which I guess wasn't that much different from me googling the same issue and spewing back whatever SO said.

I tried it myself and while it is neat for some simple repetitive things, I always end up with normal google searches or clicking on the sources because the problems I usually have to google for are also complicated problems that I need the whole original discussion and context too, not just a summary that might skip important caveats.

I dunno, I simultaneously feel old and out of touch, angry at myself for not just going with the flow and buying into it, but also disappointed in other people that rely on it without ever understanding that it's so flawed, unreliable and untrustworthy, and making people into worse programmers.

It's made my professional life way worse because it was seen as an indication that the every hack-a-thon attempt to put a stupid chat bot in everything is great, actually.

It's erased several tech jobs and replaced some helpforum commentors with bots to pretend their communities are alive and when you read their comments or 'suggestions' you can clearly tell, this isn't someone trying to help it's just a bot posting garbage pretending to help

Its making the impact of bots more polarizing, turning social media into a self radicalizing tool.

GitHub Copilot became my daily helper at work. While I'm not 100% satisfied with its code quality, I must admit it's very handy at writing boilerplate code. A few days ago, I had to write code without having internet access, and it was so disappointing to write boilerplate code by hand. It's an easy task, but it's time-consuming and unpleasant.

I use it as a glorified google search for excel formulas and excel troubleshooting. That's about it. ChatGPT is the most overhyped bullshit ever. My company made a huge push to implement it into fucking everything and then seemingly abandoned it when the hype died down.

I'm a coding hobbyist, it's been very helpful in analyzing bugs, giving quick info about syntax and converting formatting for long sections where manually typing would be time intensive.

Point taken by someone else here saying continued use of AI may mean decreased functionally for stack exchange et al. That said, the advantage of AI is that it's answering your question specifically, instead of spending time sifting through semi related answers.

Outside of code it's good at aping the form of various genres. So if I need to answer an RFP question in a sales proposal, I might feed it the prompt to get a starting point. It always needs editing since it doesn't know the details of our business and because it's writing style is bland, but it's helpful to get a first draft.

Someone suggested using it to identify things you only remember bits of or certain scenes from. I tried using it to find this YA book I read as a kid; it was not at all helpful, but did eventually lead me to do researching and finding the book elsewhere. (And it turns out the scene I was describing was exactly what happened, and the characters were named exactly what I thought they were, so that was born annoying at the time and frustrating later.)

I also tried using it to find this really obscure, incredibly bad 1970s tv movie that I had vague recollections of. Again, the scene was pretty much what I remembered, it couldn't identify it, but I eventually found a site that lists the plots of old tv movies and I read through like 30 pages of movie synopses until I found the one I was looking for.

I've also tried using it to find this 1980's interactive fiction game, but it's proved useless once again - and once again further research has identified a couple possibilities except I haven't had time to try to find the game and set up the right environment for it.

So my experience has been that it's useless in finding the things I want it to find, but that in trying to persist against it may lead me to find what I'm looking for elsewhere.

Been using Copilot instead of CharGPT but I'm sure it's mostly the same.

It adds comments and suggestions in PRs that are mostly useful and correct, I don't think it's found any actual bugs in PRs though.

I used it to create one or two functions in golang, since I didn't want to learn it's syntax.

The most use Ive gotten out of it is to replace using Google or Bing to search. It's especially good at finding more obscure things in documentation that are hard to Google for.

I've also started to use it personally for the same thing. Recently been wanting to startup the witcher 3 and remembered that there was something missable right at the beginning. Google results were returning videos that I didn't want to watch and lists of missable quests that I didn't want to parse through. Copilot gave me the answer without issue.

Perhaps what's why Google and Ms are so excited about AI, it fixes their shitty search results.

Man, so much to unpack here. It has me worried for a lot of the reasons mentioned: The people who pay money to skilled labor will think "The subscription machine can just do it." And that sucks.

I'm a digital artist as well, and while I think genAi is a neat toy to play with for shitposting or just "seeing what this dumb thing might look like" or generating "people that don't exist" and it's impressive tech, I'm not gonna give it ANY creative leverage over my work. Period. I still take issue with where it came from and how it was trained and the impact it has on our culture and planet.

We're already seeing the results of that slop pile generated from everyone who thought they could "achieve their creative dreams" by prompting a genie-product for it instead of learning an actual skill.

As for actual usefulness? Sometimes I run a local model for funsies and just bounce ideas off of it. It's like a parrot combined with a "programmer's rubber ducky." Sometimes that gets my mind moving, in the same way "autocomplete over and over" might generate interesting thoughts.

I also will say it's pretty decent at summarizing things. I actually find it somewhat helpful when YouTube's little "ai summary" is like "This video is about using this approach taking these steps to achieve whatever."

When the video description itself is just like "Join my Patreon and here's my 50+ affiliate links for blinky lights and microphones" lol

I use it to explain concepts to me in a slightly different way, or to summarize something for which there's a wealth of existing information.

But I really wish people were more educated about how it actually works, and there's just no way I'm trusting the centralized "services" for doing so.

It's really fun and helpful for character development, writing, and worldbuilding.

My broken brain thinks up of a lot of dumb questions about science, history, and other topics. I use it all the time to answer those. Especially if it's a question that's a nuisance to lookup on Wikipedia (though I still love Wikipedia). I like ChatGPT because of the interactive nature of it. And I often have dumb follow-up questions for it.

It has also been a huge help when I get stuck of a coding or scripting task. Both at work and at home.

It is extremely useful for suggesting translations and translating unclear foreign language sentences

Some of my coworkers show me their chatGPT generated drivel. They seem to be downright proud of that, like they would be gaming the system by using chatGPT instead of using their own head. However I think their daily work seems to consist of unnecessary corpo crap and they should really be fired and replaced with chatGPT.

Not much impact personally. I just read all the terrible implications of it online. Pressure in the professional world to use it, though fuck if I know what to use it for in this job. I don't like using it for my writing because I don't want to rely on something like that and because it's prone to errors.

Wish something that used a ton of resources would actually have a great impact to make it worth the waste.

Never explored it at all until recently, I told it to generate a small country tavern full of NPCs for 1st edition AD&D. It responded with a picturesque description of the tavern and 8 or 9 NPCs, a few of whom had interrelated backgrounds and little plots going on between them. This is exactly the kind of time-consuming prep that always stresses me out as DM before a game night. Then I told it to describe what happens when a raging ogre bursts in through the door. Keeping the tavern context, it told a short but detailed story of basically one round of activity following the ogre's entrance, with the previously described characters reacting in their own ways.

I think that was all it let me do without a paid account, but I was impressed enough to save this content for a future game session and will be using it again to come up with similar content when I'm short on time.

My daughter, who works for a nonprofit, says she uses ChatGPT frequently to help write grant requests. In her prompts she even tells it to ask her questions about any details it needs to know, and she says it does, and incorporates the new info to generate its output. She thinks it's a super valuable tool.

For me, the amount of people and time spent in meetings that talk about AI grossly outweighs any benefit of AI.

Work wise no impact so far but I use it to write any bullshit corpo speak emails , tidy up CVs and for things like game cheats etc. Its banned now in my job and we have to use copilot but I dont cause it will send everything back to the company so if I need it I just use chatgpt it on my personal one and email it to my work one.

I've had it improve grammar on some legal documents I had to submit and also generate a safety plan for a specific job I was working on. It did both of those things ok but I still had to edit and delete sections that weren't relevant

It seemingly has little impact. I've attempted to use LLMs a couple of times to ask very specific technical questions (on this specific model, running this specific OS version, how do I do this very specific thing) to try and cut down on the amount of research I would have to do to find a solution. The answer every time has been wrong. Once it was close enough to the answer I was able to figure it out but "close enough" doesn't seem worth bothering with most of the time.

When I search for things I always slip the AI summary at the top of the page.