Red Mosquito

Fuck no. I'm actively avoiding any and all interaction with AI inasmuch as I can. I've never been more tired of having something shoved in my face in my entire life.

Team LV

I work in a field where it becoming much more prevalent in its use. I may not like it being shoved in my face, but I need to keep up to keep working.

I pay a bit of attention to it, but I'm no expert. So far it's been useful for search/reference, but not much else for me. People are always talking about automating things with it, but it doesn't seem reliable enough.

E.H. Ruddock wrote:Since we're all mostly in the same age bracket here, anyone doing anything to better their knowledge of AI? I know some of you use Chat GPT as a search engine, and so does my wife and my 15 year old stepson. It drives me nuts. I feel like my parents' generation is the one that got left behind on the internet, but our generation could be the next to be in the dark.

I've started taking a moderately intense online tutorial that covers a lot of different AI programs and apps. It's about an hour a day for a month or so, but feel like it will be useful moving forward.

Not really the way you describe. I've learned by doing, using the generative tools in programs like Premiere Pro for small tweaks and corrections. In a lot of cases, the stuff that's now being marketed as "AI" is built on algorithmic techniques that have been around for a while -- in my space, things like automated masking, motion tracking, and noise reduction were already pretty sophisticated before the current AI boom. What’s changed, aside from the obvious rebranding, is that modern models layer machine learning on top of those methods, so instead of relying entirely on fixed rules, they can adapt based on data and handle more edge cases. That's been interesting to learn about.

I find a lot of the current gen-AI wave unsettling and annoying. There’s an undeniable "anti-art" streak in the way some of these tools are used to cheaply replace human creativity, and their sudden ubiquity is grating if not depressing. When the first batch of this generation of tools rolled out, I was right there messing around with them, fiddling around with this strange new toy, "wow, this is cool" / "wow, this is dicked up." You can see evidence of that in a bunch of old threads here. But once the novelty wore off, the more exploitative and homogenizing aspects have been laid bare, and I’ve grown more annoyed by how omnipresent they’ve become. I see obvious ChatGPT prose fucking EVERYWHERE these days, and it's never not a huge bummer.

I think most of these functionalities are here to stay in some capacity, so I’ve made a point of staying curious and experimenting hands-on, not through a formal education like you describe but by integrating them into my workflows where they actually make sense. That’s helped me develop a more grounded sense of their strengths and limitations, and also kinda figuring out how much of it I want to keep using. So far it's not much.

Jorge wrote:

E.H. Ruddock wrote:Since we're all mostly in the same age bracket here, anyone doing anything to better their knowledge of AI? I know some of you use Chat GPT as a search engine, and so does my wife and my 15 year old stepson. It drives me nuts. I feel like my parents' generation is the one that got left behind on the internet, but our generation could be the next to be in the dark.

I've started taking a moderately intense online tutorial that covers a lot of different AI programs and apps. It's about an hour a day for a month or so, but feel like it will be useful moving forward.

Not really the way you describe. I've learned by doing, using the generative tools in programs like Premiere Pro for small tweaks and corrections. In a lot of cases, the stuff that's now being marketed as "AI" is built on algorithmic techniques that have been around for a while -- in my space, things like automated masking, motion tracking, and noise reduction were already pretty sophisticated before the current AI boom. What’s changed, aside from the obvious rebranding, is that modern models layer machine learning on top of those methods, so instead of relying entirely on fixed rules, they can adapt based on data and handle more edge cases. That's been interesting to learn about.

I find a lot of the current gen-AI wave unsettling and annoying. There’s an undeniable "anti-art" streak in the way some of these tools are used to cheaply replace human creativity, and their sudden ubiquity is grating if not depressing. When the first batch of this generation of tools rolled out, I was right there messing around with them, fiddling around with this strange new toy, "wow, this is cool" / "wow, this is dicked up." You can see evidence of that in a bunch of old threads here. But once the novelty wore off, the more exploitative and homogenizing aspects have been laid bare, and I’ve grown more annoyed by how omnipresent they’ve become. I see obvious ChatGPT prose fucking EVERYWHERE these days, and it's never not a huge bummer.

I think most of these functionalities are here to stay in some capacity, so I’ve made a point of staying curious and experimenting hands-on, not through a formal education like you describe but by integrating them into my workflows where they actually make sense. That’s helped me develop a more grounded sense of their strengths and limitations, and also kinda figuring out how much of it I want to keep using. So far it's not much.

Be honest, you used AI to write that.

Yeah some of Photoshop's tools have gotten a lot better lately. Not sure how much of it is really AI, but it's working.

Stuff like the content aware fill (which already existed in a less advanced form before) has been really useful to quickly and easily fix tiny details. I haven't deeply explored the neural filters yet

Adobe also has a very good speech audio cleanup tool (they call it a "podcast enhancer") that I've used a couple times to fix up bad or noisy recordings, but once you get a feel for how it makes voices sound you start to hear it EVERYwhere.

This dude has a lot of good Photoshop videos: https://youtube.com/@piximperfect

I work in IT and everybody at work keeps asking me about how to use AI. I tell them don’t put PII in it and don’t believe everything it tells you. I think the safest use is using it to spruce up memos, emails, etc. because it’s not really giving you new information, just making your sentences sound better.

Since it’s cybersecurity awareness month I will be having a few training sessions and will discuss AI.

E.H. Ruddock wrote:Since we're all mostly in the same age bracket here, anyone doing anything to better their knowledge of AI? I know some of you use Chat GPT as a search engine, and so does my wife and my 15 year old stepson. It drives me nuts. I feel like my parents' generation is the one that got left behind on the internet, but our generation could be the next to be in the dark.

I've started taking a moderately intense online tutorial that covers a lot of different AI programs and apps. It's about an hour a day for a month or so, but feel like it will be useful moving forward.

We in here talkin about practice?

Spoiler: show

I'm in IT I use it all the time. Its wrong a lot for coding but if I forget how to do something its good at directions.

I use it as an assistant. Very good at menial parsing tasks and deciphering bits of python quickly for me. prompting is important because it can be dense. Once I find a prompt that works well, I make sure to save it.

I use it for tasks like creating tables, collating info, getting rid of noise in data, finding patterns that aren’t immediately apparent, etc. Basically skills that my adhd renders me useless at.

E.H. Ruddock wrote:I work in a field where it becoming much more prevalent in its use. I may not like it being shoved in my face, but I need to keep up to keep working.

Mine isn't to that point yet, but it's definitely being utilized. At some point it will probably become a very marketable skill, for lack of a better term. I've only played around with searches, but kinda like LV in that I'd much rather not do anything.

I started using Chat GPT for work this year, it's helped me with a heap of Excel macros that save me lots of time on my month end reporting for clients.

And this trip to Spain I've used it daily for suggestions and helping out with various things - taking a photo of the washing machine and having it advise exactly how to run a quick or semi-quick wash program has been a real bonus! Also taking photos of menus and it telling me exactly what I'm looking at or about to order - very handy.

But apart from this surface level stuff, nothing too involved. I do call him Chad GPT though - he often calls me "mate" or "bro".

One of the things that is incredibly frustrating though is how confidently incorrect he can be at times. And when I point out whatever the glaring error is he's like "Good call bro - you've spotted the issue here" or some shit. So yeah, use it daily but always with the knowledge that he is often totally incorrect.

can we please not gender clankers