Hello folks. I want to hear your opinions about the advances in AI and how it makes you feel. This is a community about privacy, so I already kind of know that you’re against it, at least when AI is implemented in such a way that it violates peoples’ privacy.
I recently attended a work-related event and the conclusion was that AI will come and change everything in our field. A field which has been generally been dominated by human work, although various software has been used for it. Without revealing too much, the event was for people who with texts. I’m a student, but the event was for people working in the field I plan to work in in the future. The speakers did not talk about privacy concerns (not in detail, at least) or things such as micro work (people who get paid very little to clean illegal content in AI training data, for example).
You probably can guess that that I care about privacy: I’m writing this on Lemmy, for a privacy community. I’m a Linux user (the first distro I used was Ubuntu 10.04) and I transitioned to Linux as my daily driver in November last year. I care about the Open Source community (most of the programs I used on Windows were FOSS). I donate to the programs I use. I use a privacy-respecting search engine, use uBlock and Privacy Badger on Firefox. I use a secure instant messenger and detest Facebook. But that’s where it ends, because I use a stock Android phone. But at least I care about these things and I’m eager to learn more. When it comes to privacy, I’m pretty woke, for the lack of a better word.
But AI is coming, or rather, it’s already here. Granted, people who talked at that event were somewhat biased, as they worked in the AI industry, so even if they weren’t marketing ChatGPT, they were trying to hype up the industry. But apparently, AI can already help so called knowledge workers. It can help in brainstorming and generating ideas. It can produce translations, it can summarize texts, it can give tips…
The bottom line seems to be that I need to start using AI, because either I will use it and keep my job in the future, or I will not use it and risk being made redundant by AI at some point in time.
But I want to get other perspectives. What are your views on AI, and has it affected your job, and if so, how? I know some people have said here that AI is just a bunch of algorithms and that it’s just hype and that the bubble will burst eventually. But until it does, it seems it’ll have a pretty big impact on how things work. Can we choose to ignore it?
While i agree with most of what you said, i think you might be falling into the trap of assuming the curve continues as it had.
Like most technology, ANNs will follow a sigmoid curve. Turing was already working with the same theories. While I did my education in IT, we had really interesting ANNs working, but only nerds would be excited by them. Now ChatGPT surprised the rest of the world and I would assume we are in the steep part of the sigmoid function.
But the problem is, that we can only determine where we where, if we look back. There is no way to say whether NOW is just the start, middle or towards the end of the curve.
What I can say is that now, LLMs and other implementations of AI are able to replace a trainee in my line of work. They still need a lot of supervision and are a tool, which can speed up work. This may lead to other problems: If companies decided to not take on the expensive task of training people and replacing them with cheaper AI - at some point we will run out of well trained veterans.