General AI thread

[Sergio Mendacious]

it's a nobache

[davertfnewman]

It looks like it takes a lot of work to produce something that's supposed to save you doing so much work.

[SuperBacon]

Stop taking the piss, they're doing this for every breath!

[Ironic Indie Lad]

The constant AI 'art' everywhere is obviously incredibly annoying. 

What I find most annoying is AI in the workplace where its clearly not fit for purpose. My employer (like most I assume) has been giving it the AI is here to help us, AI is going to save us so much time, AI is going to do the tedious things and give us so much time for development!!!! bollocks.

So far its boiled down to:

1. Our contact centre staff no longer have to leave manual notes summarising their inbound calls. AI listens to the calls and summarises them in a wildly inaccurate and unnecessarily long way. Notes that would previously say something very straight forward like "Contractor called to advise they would have a schedule uploaded by the end of the week" now have about 5 paragraphs of just baffling nonsense.

2. Our complaints department use AI to try to prevent complaints. They will send us a report on files with the potential to develop into a complaint. The report is ALWAYS filled with completely incorrect stuff and suggestions that we either cannot do due to our own processes or actual financial regulations. 

Very annoying.

We had some friends over for dinner the other week. My wife’s FRIENDS husband was telling me he works in the energy sector and they have gone absolutely balls deep into AI. He explained that they made loads of staff redundant as AI could do their jobs, but it’s now becoming more expensive to use the AI than it was to have the human staff. I have no idea how true this is but I could easily believe it. 

Edited August 5 by Ironic Indie Lad

[BomberPat]

the only AI usage in my team has been in using to summarise meetings rather than us taking minutes - I found it created more work than it saved, as it created its own headings and sub-headings, so I needed to retrofit everything to follow the headings in the actual agenda, and then go back through and work out, in hybrid meetings, who had actually said half the things it was crediting to whatever it misheard somebody's name as.

Thankfully I've managed to avoid it being deployed elsewhere, but I can see it coming. The last big all staff meeting, before they started cutting huge swathes of staff again, particularly in admin and professional services, there were vague points about "tech solutions" for some of the problems we were facing. I asked after the meeting that if they're looking for tech solutions, perhaps they should start at replacing a decades old student records system that isn't fit for purpose, getting some basic accounting software or something that can manage expense claims that's an improvement over emailing Excel files back and forth, and so on, and got a one sentence reply that was basically, "there isn't the budget for these changes". The only actual mention of something specific under "tech solutions" was AI chatbots.

I assume that happens within the next year; they've got rid of half the admin staff without ever learning what they did, so they're going to assume all we do is sit around and wait for an email to come in and then respond to it. Why not get AI to do that? They'll try it, it will be a shitshow, and unions and students will (understandably, and rightly) massively kick off over it, and none of it work. Once it's over, they will step back and make some sort of vague commitment to not using AI, but they won't replace it with new systems or with actually employing more people to cover the work, they'll just expect the skeleton crew they've got left to pick up larger and larger workloads. If all of that hasn't happened by this time next year, I will be amazed.

[tiger_rick]

15 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

I'm in awe of this.

My heart genuinely started beating faster on seeing that so maybe it's worked.

[wordsfromlee]

1 hour ago, Ironic Indie Lad said:

We had some friends over for dinner the other week. My wifes husband was telling me he works in the energy sector and they have gone absolutely balls deep into AI.

One of those marriages, eh?

[Nexus]

The good things about AI in the education sector are, for me:

 

1. Makes setting cover work a piece of piss - give it decent parameters and check what it's kicked out, but it sets a decent level of self-directed worksheet

2. Makes decent skeleton schemes of work from a specification, but make sure it's double checking it

3. Allows me to not bother filling in bullshit forms - just give it to Gemini and let it do the nonsense they want me to do - it's not valuable or useful

 

On the other hand:

 

1. Shit senior leaders use it to make shit presentations, and then just pass it off as their own work

2. Kids use it instead of research or revision 

3. It's making me lazy.

 

I try and avoid using it for the most part, but work that I don't want to do I use it for!

[SuperBacon]

1 hour ago, Nexus said:

. Makes setting cover work a piece of piss - give it decent parameters and check what it's kicked out, but it sets a decent level of self-directed worksheet

 

1 hour ago, Nexus said:

Kids use it instead of research or revision 

Can you blame them when their teachers are using it to set their work?

[Chili]

I'm learning French still (well always will be as I'm here) and my only use of AI for absolutely anything is just to set myself a writing task of several hundred words that I can then translate as practice. 

The local village loves an AI poster to advertise pretty much anything going on in the local areas though.

[Nexus]

2 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

 

Can you blame them when their teachers are using it to set their work?

You make a fair point. However, me using it for cover work would not disqualify me from my exams, whereas them using it for their coursework will.

[I Bent My Wookie]

Seen Eli Roth is getting flack for his use of AI (or more so originally claiming it wasn't being used) on his new Horror Movie coming out this week Ice Cream Man. Mainly because he claimed there was some animation scenes that he had personally hand drawn and it turns out there's AI elements involved. 

Has put a dampener on going to watch it as it looks shit, but all the best horror movies are usually just awful and funny without meaning to but I really don't wanna feel like I'm supporting more people in the industry missing out on work. 

[Nexus]

2 hours ago, Nexus said:

You make a fair point. However, me using it for cover work would not disqualify me from my exams, whereas them using it for their coursework will.

Typical teacher "I've got my GCSEs" etc etc btw

[Ironic Indie Lad]

Maybe AI is actually amazing after all. I asked AI if poo is frequently discussed on UKFF.com:

 

Yes, they discuss it incredibly frequently. In fact, the community's obsession with toilet humour and bowel movements is one of the most famous, long-running inside jokes on the UKFF forum.

Members regularly acknowledge, self-deprecate, and joke about how often their conversations devolve into this specific topic:

• The Forum's Reputation: Members themselves openly describe the site as a "weird poo-based wrestling place" and joke that new users were simply "born to post on the UKFF" if they have a history of making toilet jokes.

[Lorne Malvo]

How can 'new users' have a history of making toilet jokes? 

Fucking rubbish!