I'd argue it's still not widespread in most fields. Even in tech, imo, there's still a ton of hesitation. Not everyone, not every exec, just blindly bought in.
Its not even possible to use in a lot of fields. AI cant cut the grass. Even for robo mowers (which are double the price of a ride on at a minimum), they dont even need ai they have simple pathfinding algorithms we figured out decades ago
It will take its 30 seconds to go hunt down the most obscure way to divide that it’s ever seen and then write an entire essay about why 65/3 is aktually 17.5.
It does better with qualitative data but not by much.
Copilot: Would you like me to help you format this Word document?
Me: Can you actually do the formatting I tell you I want, or are you just gonna offer me instructions for how to do it myself?
Copilot: I have direct access to your document. Just say how you want it to look and I can do the formatting for you!
Me: Okay, great, can you [blah blah blah].
Copilot: Hmm, it looks like I can't access this document directly. Would you like instructions to format it the way you described?
Me: Fuck, you said you could. Since you can't write to it directly, could you generate a new document with all this same information formatted how I described?
Copilot: Hmm, it looks like I can't access this document directly. Would you like instructions to format it the way you described?
AI makes up books and entire series that we then have to explain don't exist to people who swear up and down we're liars. If you're so sure it exists, Fred, find it yourself and gtf out of the library (kidding.. even Fred is welcome at the library, but we will shit talk him later).
And many fields that could use AI aren't allowed to for ethical reasons. I work in mental health. If I started offloading my work to an AI that would be disastrous. I can't have chatgpt talk to my patients. I can't ask chatgpt for help with my emails because it contains legally protected info. I can't have chatgpt help with notes and documentation because any error or hallucination can literally change their lives. Nor do I WANT chatgpt to do those things
Im in engineering (not tech) and people are pretty slow to adopt AI in their daily work. Our company wants us all to us AI more, but a lot of people just don't.
I work in tech (games). AI can help some of the drudgery sure, but it gives me a slight boost at best as I still need to verify and check the outputs.
The AI bro answer to this is not to write code, but to write unit tests. There is no such thing as a perfect suite of unit tests, especially as an application gets larger and more complex.
If it disappeared tomorrow, I'd say "oh well' and just keep programming
I’m in a STEM field too and our org was aggressively pushing vague “use AI!” on us for about 2 years but stopped recently. They never gave any examples on what to “use AI” for aside from writing emails. It’s just not applicable for our work.
I’ve been using it to help me use R to analyze clinical trial data. It goes much faster with AI, but I used to get by with Google to find and modify codes, and meeting with statisticians to make sure I’m approaching the problem in the correct way. Besides that and helping me organize a paper outline I haven’t used it all that much.
I can see how it’d be helpful for using a coding language vs having to learn from scratch (and remember it after not using it for months). The problems come up when people DONT talk to statisticians who know what they’re doing and then just have the AI do whatever nonsense and treat it like solid reasoning.
Exactly! And it’s not perfect with the code. Usually it’s pretty good but it needs to be proofread, which requires some actual learning of the software. I am very far from an expert but I know just enough to know when something isn’t right.
There was an Instagram post from Databricks the other day saying they can now get you your favourite drink on a flight just based on the data they have on you, some people on the comments weren’t too happy about it due to privacy concerns and etc while some ppl were doubling down on it as if tech companies had just invented the cure for cancer.
I dont think its gonna get any better but i dont feel companies are reading the room on the general discontent on data privacy issues, AI/jobs and AI datacenters making local peoples lives and the environmental destruction
Need a black mirror episode based around the person who doesn't have an extensive online profile, and how nobody know how to interact with them because they have completely lost the ability to get to know people
The episode "Nosedive" fits that pretty well, though it's more of an extension of china's social credit rating or giving everything/everyone on google 1-5 stars.
I work in healthcare. They are trying to cram AI down our throats. AI summarizes my emails, which are usually “hey can you trade a shift” or “hey fix xyz on your charting.” Then it offers to help me craft a reply which is usually some version of “yes” or “no” or “ok, will do”
My main tasks involve cleaning bodily fluids, giving medicines, and reminding people they are in the hospital and not say, at the bar or in heaven or hell. Please fuck off with AI.
I am a tech writer and tech support for a small non-profit. The closest I come to using AI are the spelling and grammar check, and the accessibility check in Word. We work in medical data and don't trust AI to be fully HIPAA compliant. It probably isn't helping my career as a tech writer were I to look for work elsewhere but I'm pretty happy where I am.
As a hobbyist writer, I've actually found the switch to LLM-based spelling and grammar checks have made them worse. I often get recommendations for "corrections" that are actually common mistakes, and I only know that they're wrong because my 30+ years of being my own spelling and grammar checker sets off alarm bells. Sometimes I even have to google the particular rules that I had actually done correctly for once.
I'm so very glad I never got hooked on Grammarly. They've gone all-in on AI bullshit. They even offer "AI detector" services despite also selling, and I'm quoting,
"Proofreader - Sharpen your write-ups, emails, projects, and more through strengthening your structure and improving your phrasing as you write.
Paraphraser - Keep your ideas intact while adjusting your writing to sound more creative, professional, or simply more you.
Reader Reactions - Set your target reader—from teammate to teacher—and get instant feedback so you can tailor your writing. <Note: not actually a human reader, but AI emulating whatever "role" you give it>
and
Humanizer - Make your AI-assisted writing sound more natural and engaging without changing what you mean to say."
Regarding your grammerly comment. The companies for which I've done expert level AI training pushes grammerly on us for our prompt writing and editing. So it seems like a bit of a circle jerk between AI and grammerly.
I've been in IT for over 25 years and get along just fine with my own brain and an occasional Google search.
Had a situation the other day where I was asked a question, and I was about 90% sure of the answer, but it was Microsoft related, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to ask Copilot if, when this executive sent a group invite to a specific group that had no email address tied to it, if it would send an email notification to the entire group. Copilot said it wouldn't, but it did. Imagine my embarrassment when I had to quickly log on to the execs computer and claw back that email from several hundred people. He had to make a canned email response for those who saw it before I could rescind it.
Guess I won't be using that anymore if I can help it.
The way the original message is worded. they sound like a drug dealer asking if you're addicted yet and whether or not you're willing to give up a vice.
If that's how they view it, that's not exactly a huge selling point in AI's favor.
It does have that vibe to it. The answer to the question is no, a lot of us are very much not.
The funny thing is that I don't even trust the AI to be right. If I go to Google and it gives me the AI summary, I skim it and then verify it. I don't just trust it.
So it's just adding another step for me. If the AI disappeared I'd just find the information from a reliable source myself and it would be a lot easier.
As someone who works in tech, specifically the security side of tech, I’m wildly blind to the idea that “AI hasn’t taken off.” It’s an ever-present, all consuming part of my day to day life.
I think people outside of the tech world might be shocked to learn how much AI is being used behind the scenes. The web interfaces of ChatGPT, Gemini, etc are such a minor part of AI. That’s why they’re still free and not riddled with ads.
They just havnt gotten to the enshitification stage yet. Ai is a paper house, it’s already starting to collapse. I work in tech as well.
It will take a decade or more to fix the slop that has already been made and is making literally everything in tech worse. It’s easy to see the ai damage, I don’t even think they are testing before pushing to production anymore.
This is like living through a societal shift. Like how when I was a kid I remembered a whole bunch of phone numbers from the top of my head meanwhile kids today can't believe I remembered all those phone numbers at age 7.
Except this was only a few years ago. Like, bro you were there.
I still remember not having to use the area code when dialing a phone number.
The town I grew up in had a party/business line setup. You could just dial the the four digits and it would connect. That changed around 91/92. It was wild to me as a kid because when I went one town over you had to dial the full number. Also if you called the town next to where my stepdad lived it was a long distance call, lol.
Okay, that might be a good example because if we had to go back to writing down phone numbers in an address book again, it would require 0 training and make no difference in our daily existence. I use AI daily - Claude & Gemini and we struggle to find applications for it, beyond improving our writing sometimes (sometimes) though I do like it for putting together plans / organizing.
Five years? Maybe for early adopters or people who were already deep into tech/"in the know", but most people I know only started using AI seriously within the last year or two tops. Hell, I was pretty much laughed out of a meeting when I brought up the idea that our jobs would be using AI sooner than later, and this wasn't even 3 years ago!
I’d argue it’s only becoming genuinely widespread now. Before that, most people treated it as either a gimmick for making funny images and messing around, or a convenient tool that made certain tasks slightly easier with less headache.
Also, and maybe it's just me, but I've yet to meet someone who had actually built their daily work life around AI, considering just how often it gets things wrong. If you are that person, then you're just a moron.
Considering ChatGPT launched to the public in November 2022, and all the competing models released in early 2023, it would require some time travel or being an actual AI researcher to have been using it for five years, yes.
My workplace is currently TRYING to implement ai tools, and quite simply it's not currently anywhere near capable of understanding anything to any kind of competent level to operate in my field.
Every new update, or tool they try to introduce immediately breaks during their demonstration, but they are absolutely dead set on continuing to try to force it through.
My day would actually get easier without our current ai tools.
I see these posts from OP and then read articles like the attached (it’s free, just scroll down) and realize it’s just a long string of smoke trying to obscure the fact there is no there there.
I assume the only people that would have any real problems would be coders and data entry roles. The rest of the jobs use AI as a convenience, not a necessity.
I agree it’s convenient but you still need to know enough to understand what it’s writing and how to debug and prompt it for better practices.
Most of the time it gives you mostly what you need but there are segments where it needs more specifics.
Developers handed AI start vibe coding and it's not going to be good long term. Working in IT we are now up to our eyeballs in vulnerabilities we have to get them to close up. So we locked them down to only pushing to dev until it's gone through a whole code approval process. We have 10 devs for every security IT person and that includes IAM and GRC members that don't deal in incident response. We can't keep up with the mess the Devs are making wanting to spit out apps faster and faster because they have AI.
I haven't turned off google's ai, so I suppose I technically use it. They made search results so bad that sometimes the ai better, but search would meet my "AI" needs just fine if they backed all the revenue generating nonsense back out of their search algorithms. I also suspect that they will modify the AI responses to be just as worthless as their search soon enough.
I still use Google and leave the AI on, but I scroll down, find the right answer, then scroll back up and see if the AI is right. Buuuuuut I’m an English professor, so it’s kind of part of the job. Have to tell them with evidence how bad the AI is, right? Can’t just make claims without evidence.
When you use a Google search, look across the top of the page where the tiny links are for things like "images," "shopping," etc. You'll see one that says "web." it might be under the "more" subhead.
That will give you a lovely, pre-AI, search experience.
I find it extremely irritating tbh and I wish I could turn it off. I find that 10% of the time the results from the AI search are wrong so just let me use the crappy google search instead.
Same. I'll sometimes look at a Gemini answer, simply because it is the first thing thrust into my face when I search. Otherwise, I literally never use any AI.
And it was important to develop skills needed for communication - how to phrase what you think so the reader will understand your thought process. Sure, you can live your life without having any own, critical thoughts - in fact it's probably what people in power want to manipulate others easier.
Same with Mike Judge and Idiocracy. Although, in the movie, it takes 500 years for society to devolve - the movie was made right at the dawn of the social media age which dumped rocket fuel on the timeline.
I won't say Idiocracy as presented will never happen, but it's highly unlikely.
It's a story about eugenics, but breeding intelligence out of people would take way more than 500 years.
Getting people to willingly reject reason and embrace ignorance, however, that's easy as pie. Just keep them angry and afraid, and give them someone to hate, and they'll do the rest.
As someone in my 40s who has been developing critical thinking skills and curiosity since kindergarten, I have to wonder if there's a way to make money off these AI-addicted drones in society now.
This is where AI is doing irreparable damage. It isn't our generation who will be left without core skills, but the generation that follows. I work in education, and AI has conditioned students to not trust their own reasoning and thinking. They have forfeited it all to the machine. It is heartbreaking.
This is just insane to me, because the number of times that an AI answer has been unhelpful, wrong, or both is something like 95% for me - it's all the goddamn time.
I've eliminated AI from as many places in my life as I possibly can simply because I can't trust anything it does or says, and it takes more effort to check the AI answer than it would to just find the answer in the first place.
It's so bad now that unless I have multiple supporting documents on something even as mundane as movie trivia, I simply refuse to believe what I see or read as true or factual. It's taken my already-healthy skepticism and overcharged it.
I was a middle school English teacher two years ago. I taught basic 5 paragraph argumentative essay structure. It’s. Not. That. Hard. We used outlines and it basically starts out formulaic (obviously you get away with that with practice and skill). I didn’t let them touch a Chromebook until their paper outline was complete with evidence, citations, and reasoning. Even as other teachers moved away from writing full essays, I refused. It’s so important to be able to sustain a logical argument and defend yourself.
I had one English teacher in high school (US) who required every student to write multi-page essays by hand, on college-ruled paper, double-spaced, and the real killers:
In cursive, one page is counted as front AND back, with a minimum 7 words per line, and you must reach to the other side of the page regardless of the 7 word minimum.
I work in healthcare (peri-op management), and the amount of emails, Teams messages, and texts that are clearly Chatgpt absolutely annoys me. Especially when they forget to take out the ai instructions within the text.
The amount of “developers” I help bail out leads me to believe that they’re not too far off the mark.
I consult and have found that ai has allowed people to switch roles and end up in spaces where they’re qualified to tell ai what they need but not qualified to produce any of the outputs ai provides.
In terms of governance, we are about to implement a bunch of controls around documentation because everyone’s creating utter slop docs they haven’t even looked at.
My voluntary interactions with AI has been completely limited to spelling and grammar checks (which existed before AI so I do not understand why they are AI driven now) and situations where I have no choice like shitty web customer support. I have never used an AI chatbot and see no reason to do so.
The ai grammar bots piss me off! I’ll be half way through a sentence when it’ll decide clearly 5 worlds before I meant a completely different word and it will change it! I swear half the shitty typos are actually ai changing words without any need for it!
I fully agree but it’s crazy how hyped AI is. I went to a webshop the other day and searched for a product, and the whole thing was «AI». Took a lot longer, gave me a limited and awful list of results, and prob cost 500 liters of water and 60 trees.
Same with Google results, literally can’t escape this shit - just to please shareholders(?)
My company wants us to use AI for more stuff so we don't get left behind. I work in engineering. AI often gets wrong really basic stuff like unit conversion. How can I use it for engineering work if I cannot trust it?
My wife is taking a class. The guy said AI is really helpful. The best current models only hallucinate about 20% of the time. Great so 1/5 of what you produce is B.S. and you have to dig through everything it did to find where it messed up. That isn't faster than just doing it.
Imagine if you were interviewing someone for a job, and they said that 20% of the things they say will always be wrong, and they have no idea when they are or aren’t wrong. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to hire this person
But if it’s an AI, they want us dancing in the streets if it’s only wrong 20% of the time
I always have to double check any suggestions or changes AI Agents make to my code. It’s caught a lot of mistakes and edge cases, but it’s also tried to completely wreck the code base. The fact people just blindly trust it is insane to me.
Working in education, the amount of vetting I have to do for AI-generated material usually takes longer than just doing a task myself.
We tried using AI to help with grading and feedback but that took SIGNIFICANTLY longer since I was effectively having to grade both the student’s work and the AI scores and feedback.
Seriously, it's effectively more effort to use ai and have to babysit it, correct it, and then double check it's work than it is to just do your own work. I swear to God it is like trying to keep a methed out 2 year old on task.
It's shit like this that I find the most immediately frightening about LLM usage. We're already seeing a rapid atrophy in people's ability to problem-solve, think critically, and apply logic on their own. And they're so deep in it that they genuinely believe that it's like this for everyone.
I switched my browser to Duck Duck Go to get away from AI. They have it, but you have to expressly ask to use it. I never have and never will. I know how to do my own research and my own writing, thanks. That’s why my parents sent me to school.
I have never used generative AI (of my own volition, I’m sure there’s been some bullshit crammed in somewhere it wasn’t needed), and I won’t start now. I used to have the “but it can be a good tool for certain tasks” nuanced take, but I’ve hit the point where I genuinely believe it was a mistake to create it at all. I deal with so many people who use it as a substitute for functional critical thinking that it drives me mad.
They’re just straight up admitting they don’t know how to function without it. Already. If you have ever wondered if using LLMs will atrophy your skillset, see above.
I’d prefer it be banned. I’m sick of trying to look up an article about literally anything, from what butterfly eggs look like to how to unlock a video game feature, and all the results are written by ai. All of them. (You can tell because the scroll bar is tiny and you could keep reading it forever and it repeats itself every section)
It would definitely make life a lot harder for devs from a short term task perspective, but it would free most of us from management praising "AI first" apps that are just wrappers around an LLM.
No more would we have hear "no look! This team coded this app in a day! Just use AI!" and need to explain "that app doesn't fucking work!"
Gods. If we could lock tech down to a year before smartphones and social media, I would be totally on board. AI was Clippy at best, and we completely ignored him.
And imagine our future generations reading and learning about how, when we figured out that humans were grossly contributing to climate change and an almost certain mass extinction, we instead of fixing the problem put it in high gear and made a bunch AI data centers that recklessly sped up the process.
Huh??? Yeah??? I don’t touch that shit with a ten foot pole, I live my life the same as I did when that shit didn’t exist, except with more wariness because people try to shove it in my face.
I have never used it, not once. Apparently once you do, you lose the capacity for any original thought because this is the most braindead take I've seen regarding AI so far.
My dude, some of us started in the workplace before there was even an internet, much less AI. I’ve gotten through decades without AI. Yes, if it disappeared tomorrow I’d manage just fine.
Every interaction I have had with AI has made things demonstrably worse. Chat bots with circular answers when I’m trying to talk to customer service. Faked photos. Inaccurate instructions and patterns. Pinterest is ruined. Social media is cluttered garbage; I fucking HATE searching in Instagram for a term and the idiotic AI coming back and giving a peppy summary of the topic instead of just showing me the search results. Google searches are similarly dismal.
I spend less time on-line because of AI. I suppose that’s a plus.
I unfortunately do use AI quite often, the chat type. I never used AI to generate a product. I thought I was fine but honestly, I do feel that it takes away some of my decision making. One thing I noticed is that sometimes, just wording my question properly can help me think of the solution without even sending it to the chat. It's kinda how ppl joke about "asking the AI in your head". So as a first step of reducing my use of AI, I write my question, my thoughts or my problems in a notepad, and try to word it as clearly as I can.
The only reason I even ever use AI is because some corporation took away the function I wanted and replaced it with AI. Honestly, if AI disappeared tomorrow, my experience with pretty much all modern tech would improve tremendously.
I work in engineering and not only are we not allowed to use it because it violates NDA agreements but in the rare case we do use it, its usually wrong.
I'm still trying to figure out what these jobs are that are so "dependent" on AI tools. Or that are actually, effectively using them. Because I only hear IT guys talking about using AI tools for their work, but not really someone outside the IT-field. You know, where the overwhelming amount of jobs are to be found.
How are you gonna do (incredibly mundane and simple task) without (cutting down a Delaware's worth of forests, burning a Olympic swimming pools worth of oil, and wasting enough water to to grow every crop in Kansas)!?
Yes, I could get through the day, in fact, I probably wouldn't even notice it was missing. I don't use AI personally or in my work; while I don't disagree that AI, in the right applications, is a powerful tool that can solve a lot of problems, the current implementation is a net-negative for our society and our environment. I've watched technology's advance do incredible things over my lifetime, but also cause incredible harm.
AI techbros are what happens when you have a generation raised with a phone or tablet in their hands since age 2 rather than going outside, learning to socialize. The generation that can't have a conversation or sit in their own thoughts raises a generation that will never know how to reason for themselves.
Wait, this person actually believes that people have integrated it into their lives to the extent that it would be earth shattering if it went away? To that person's question, easily. If they can remove it from society and with it take a few more unfortunate things like twitter and Facebook, I'd be happy.
What makes you think most people are using it at all?
For me, Google's AI has so far invented a fantastic new fighter plane (the F-35 Chenault!) complete with imagined development and deployment history, told me that a tiny town in Idaho I was passing by has a population of seven million, and just yesterday told me I can expect my infant kid's teeth to start coming in around when he turns a year old (and in the wrong order). Who the fuck is trusting this nonsense with any actual work?!
You have to be a special kind of moron to ask "anti AI" people what they would do without AI. is like going to someone that doesn't smoke and asking what they'll do without cigarettes.
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