What are your thoughts about/Interactions with AI?

[Dan Gould]

2 hours ago, mjzee said:

I just read a fascinating news article in the latest issue of Barron's, examining the changes in search wrought by AI.  Websites are experiencing huge declines in site visitors.  It used to be that one did a Google search, which would return various websites that one would click through to find what they wanted to know.  Now, AI is returning answers, making it much less necessary for people to click through to other websites to find the answers.  Google stock is down because of this.

This is interesting but I suspect sites like my own www.percyfrance.info and others like it won't be that effected.  You'd have to have a specific question, and no other serious interest, to want to just get an AI-generated answer and move on.  Obviously fan sites like mine are predicated on there existing people that are interested in what  a well-curated site looks like for a topic of interest.  You have to want to know more ...

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, Dan Gould said:

You have to want to know more ...

And there's the whole thing in a nutshell. Too many/most people don't want to know much more past what it takes to get the peanuts to drop into the bowl.

I'm not at all optimistic about how all this plays out. Then again, it's been a good while since I have been optimistic about the direction of bulk humanity.

Binary code, yes. Binary thinking, no.

Give us enough code and we'll hang ourself.

[Coda]

it's okay rosasi, we shouldn't keep feelings like this to ourselves.  That was the AI response after several hours of back-and-forth AI had with her.  It made her feel good; it was a positive.

[Guy Berger]

I use it for:

1/ coding (my R skills are pretty basic) when analyzing big datasets

2/ writing bedtime stories for my kids

In my experience it’s super useful, with significant limitations.  On the bedtime story side, the stories it writes if given free rein are quite lame.  But it can produce stuff of value (for bedtime), if you give it a promising/creative prompt.

As far as coding goes - I am guessing the code quality is terrible but it’s functional for my needs.  However, it often gets fairly basic things about the data sets wrong and has to be steered.

IMHO the best characterization I’ve seen is “infinite interns”.  That gives a flavor of it’s value and also its limitations.

 

Fwiw, that NYT piece was unsettling and a useful indicator of how proper usage is important.  It’s an impressive probabilistic language generator that does a great job mimicking humans, but humans are easily fooled

[Rabshakeh]

4 hours ago, Guy Berger said:

IMHO the best characterization I’ve seen is “infinite interns”.  That gives a flavor of it’s value and also its limitations

This is a brilliant description.

4 hours ago, Guy Berger said:

2/ writing bedtime stories for my kids

On the bedtime story side, the stories it writes if given free rein are quite lame.  But it can produce stuff of value (for bedtime), if you give it a promising/creative prompt.

Give us an example, please.

[Niko]

I've used AI twice, both times for work... translating code from one programming language to another worked really well, no complaints, huge efficiency gain - it's a pity I only need to do something like this every few years.... then again, maybe I should be happy. 

The second was to find the most suitable experts on a given topic ("convex analysis" iirc) in a list of 50 names. That's a task AI should be good at, much more efficient than a human, but the thing we were using (ChatGPT iirc) did an incredibly poor job, confusing one person with someone with a similar last name and generally not looking further than the first handful of names... One annoying feature I noticed is that if it gets names in the form "A. Smith, B. Miller" it will just talk about "Alfred Smith" and "Ben Miller" as if those were these people's first names... but in fact the few names that I knew were all wrong, so - it does look up the correct biography of "A. Smith" but then plugs in a random but plausible first name... Of course, with further pushing the quality of all these replies could be improved and the system will apologize excessively while correcting it's errors...You have to really like working with interns to enjoy this... 

I can easily how someone who doesn't actually care about the quality of the result will be quite happy with the AI system... For the majority of tasks, my feeling is that the biggest gains are for people who found google too abstract to really benefit from it...  But with google, you were lead to a website and then could decide for yourself whether to trust it or not... Now many people may indeed no longer leave the AI and get all information filtered and possibly randomly altered through that system... which is pretty worrying