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.
My son is in a PhD program and is a TA for a geophysics class that’s mostly online, so he does a lot of grading assignments/tests. The number of things he gets that are obviously straight out of an LLM is really disgusting. Like sometimes they leave the prompt in. Sometimes the submit it when the LLM responds that it doesn’t have enough data to give an answer and refers to ways the person could find out. It’s honestly pretty sad.
AI has completely killed my desire to teach writing at the community college level.
Agreed. I started steps needed to be certified as an educator in my state but decided against it. ChatGPT isn’t the only reason, but it is a contributing factor. I don’t envy all of the teachers out there right now who have to throw out the entire playbook of what worked in the past.
And I feel bad for students like me who really struggled with in-class writing by hand in a limited amount of time, because that is what everyone is resorting to right now.
It must be something like(only worse) what math teachers felt when the pocket calculator became cheap and easily available. It doesn’t mean you can do math but people conflate the two.
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”.
im sorry.
managers tend to be useless fucking idiots.
Curious - what type of job was this? Like, how was AI used to interact with your customers?
It was just a small e-commerce store. Online sales and shipping. The boss wanted me to run emails i would send to vendors through gpt and any responses for customer complaints were put through GPT. We also had a chat function on our site for asking questions and what not and the boss wanted us to copy the customers’ chat into gpt, get a response, rewrite if necessary, and then paste GPT’s response into our chat. It was so ass backwards I just refused to do it. Not to mention it made the response times super high, so customers were just leaving rather than wait (which of course was always the employees fault).
That sounds as asinine as you seem to think it was. Damn dude. What a dumb way to do things. You’re better off without that stupidity in your life
I absolutely hate AI. I’m a teacher and it’s been awful to see how AI has destroyed student learning. 99% of the class uses ChatGPT to cheat on homework. Some kids are subtle about it, others are extremely blatant about it. Most people don’t bother to think critically about the answers the AI gives and just assume it’s 100% correct. Even if sometimes the answer is technically correct, there is often a much simpler answer or explanation, so then I have to spend extra time un-teaching the dumb AI way.
People seem to think there’s an “easy” way to learn with AI, that you don’t have to put in the time and practice to learn stuff. News flash! You can’t outsource creating neural pathways in your brain to some service. It’s like expecting to get buff by asking your friend to lift weights for you. Not gonna happen.
Unsurprisingly, the kids who use ChatGPT the most are the ones failing my class, since I don’t allow any electronic devices during exams.
I’m generally ok with the concept of externalizing memory. You don’t need to memorize something if you memorize where to get the info.
But you still need to learn how to use the data you look up, and determine if it’s accurate and suitable for your needs. Chat gpt rarely is, and people’s blind faith in it is frightening
Are you teaching in university? Also you said “%99 of students uses ChatGPT”, are there really very few people who don’t use AI?
In classes I taught in university recently I only noticed less than %5 extremely obvious Ai helped papers. The majority is too bad to even be ai, and around 10% of good to great papers.
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.
Thank you for your honest answer from this perspective.
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.
Eleven Labs really does good work. I’m also using it for a project, in this case to teach children to read.
Luckily we don’t need accurate info for training reference manuals, it’s not like safety is involved! …oh wait
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.
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’s the Chick-fil-A sandwich of chatbots; the child in the basement of Omelas of doing busywork.
Searching the internet for information about… well anything has become infuriating. I’m glad that most search engines have a time range setting.
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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.
Very wise. Terrifying to think an aerospace company would use AI.
It seems like all companies are susceptible to top level executives, who don’t understand the technology, wanting to know how they’re capitalizing on it, driving lower level management to start pushing it.
Great points. Not only the output cannot be trusted, but also reviewing code is notoriously a much more boring activity than writing it, which means our attention is going to be more challenged, in addition to the risk of underestimating the importance of the review over time (e.g., it got it right last 99 times, I will skim this one).
It’s affected me by being really annoying to hear about in the news all the time.
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." endwhich 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
I was in the same boat a while ago when I had to use React for remaking a UI (was reworking the whole backend). I’ve never tried writing something in JS/TS, so it was super helpful having Copilot guide my hand. Took me a day but had a beautiful little interactive window by the end of it!
I’m in the same boat. Chat gpt is great for little bits of code where you forgot how to do X Y or Z, especially when there’s a lot of nuance.
Or if you need to ask it a hyper specific question as Lin as there’s been 5 people out there asking the 5 pieces of your question, it will combine them into the one answer you want.
Also it sure ain’t perfect, and anyone who thinks it will wholesale replace any skilled job is an idiot. It can assist someone and make them more efficient, but it won’t replace them.
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.
Why not just start with disclosing that you’re human right off the bat?
That’s exactly what a bot would say.
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.
