AI in the Workplace

[chrismpw]

I have taken to automatically down thumbing any ai videos on YouTube that are fed to me. Needs to be stopped.

 

[The Binman]

Couldn't find a suitable/similar thread, but just wondering if anyone is starting to be concerned by the heavy usage of AI in their workplace.

I work in the construction industry but more project management/controls side of things and I am astounded at how many emails and reports I am receiving that have clearly got chatGPT's sweaty fingerprints all over it.

There's a young girl in my company that's recently been nominated for Apprentice of the Year for her portfolio work and I know for a fact it has all come from chatGPT.

I don't use AI myself as I think once I start I won't stop and I'm dumb enough as it is these days just from access to Google.

Anyone else a little unnerved by how dominating it's becoming? Does your company have ways to detect usage of AI?

Hell, even MS Teams keeps telling me to use their inbuilt Copilot system just when I'm chatting to someone.

I too work in construction, and it feeply concerns me the reliance folks already have. We have already dumbed down society enough as it is.

I am no clever cloggs, but this to me just further accentuates the dumbing down further of people and society.

I personally think its crazy, insane behaviour.

 

[ArtetaMoney]

I work in Projects, and we are encouraged to use it.

I mainly use it for checking emails before I send them to either senior management or suppliers. I like it as it can be very useful.

Outside of the workplace I use it to create pics of my mates to ridicule them for stuff they've said in the past, then stick them on the WhatsApp group. One of the lads said years ago that he once saw a UFO, so most of them are UFO/alien related. Which I think is what AI was really meant for.

 

[Rita_Poon]

Cheers Al

 

[Swartzy]

Some scary reading in here.

The future looks bright tho

 

[notrevE5]

Nice. Can you recommend a bombproof sealant for sandstone? Doing some hardscape in my back yard. Prefer it have some texture so we don't slip and bust our melons...we have flood irrigation so it'll be under water for a bit (typically less than 24 hours unless it's rained beforehand) every two to four weeks, depending on time of year.

Am no expert on sealers but one brand I find quite good is Sika natural stone sealer, another one might be Easy Seal, both of them are water based and its best to apply two coats

 

[leslad]

There are useful things too.

Once you set up a RAG system, it kind of allows for custom training your own statistical models, which can be incredibly useful and significantly improve behaviour and reduce hallucinations. It also gets a lot of benefit from clear task structure that's built in a way that's token-efficient to parse, which is a whole discipline to learn in and of itself...

I have found it useful to help me generate the first 80% of work that I probably would have blown off as unimportant before. Stuff like status reports or transforming my notes into a design doc for others to use. Only the first 80% though, because it's still not even close to a replacement for a human that knows what they're talking about. It's also cool for doing some deep context searches of an unknown codebase (though it still hallucinates pretty heavily here, and you need to be vigilant).

Without RAG it's at best a teenager* on their first week on the job equipped with OG google search from 2002-2010 (when it was good enough to basically do the same thing AI is doing now for research, before Google needed to make the product worst to improve their monetization of it). You can make it do stuff for you, but you wouldn't trust it with anything except the clearest instructions.

It's a cool tool that people that are good at building systems can use to build systems differently. Clever people can now do clever things slightly faster (maybe, evidence is pointing to that it's actually slower than just doing it by hand). And purpose built statistical models will, shock, continue to do amazing things (see all the AI "breakthroughs" in sciences)...none of that's really new though. That's the same thing we've been seeing for decades, packaged differently.

People that are not good at building systems will build horrifying monstrosities with it that will require much engineering to undo in the coming decades.

It's also wildly socially toxic because it's being touted as actual AI and a replacement for people. And as noted above, loads of people are offloading critical thinking to it because it's easier and it does get things right a good percentage of the time. Especially simple things with well documented truth-based evidence that's extant on the internet.

Unfortunately, the important parts of life are rarely simple things things with well-documented truth-based evidence extant on the internet.

ETA: *A properly dim teenager that keeps forgetting the corrections you have to constantly give them.

this summary is excellent.

in my workplace, for internal-facing tasks where we are trying to automate some of our data exchange/communication processes, we've found it only gets near or above the 80% you quote with a lot of embedding - RAG like you mention, plus model-context protocol (MCP) servers. It's only after this acute hand-holding that it begins to become truly useful. And doing all that hand-holding work takes a LOT of human brainpower.

Any external (read, customer) facing tasks have proven zero success so far, because they are too generic and the data jungle chaos that's generated by the real world is idiosyncratic to refine AI and make it useful.

 

[Bkk Andy]

And if that tech ever fails, or becomes privatised, what you're left with is a bunch of people who have no idea how to do anything in your workplace. Sounds like a fun scenario.

Being too scared to lose to try and win sounds like the Dyche approach to business.

 

[Bkk Andy]

The dig was at management speak, but it seems you're a bit spikey about that. Perhaps a meeting, or a working group could help? Or just ask Chatcrap. I'm sure you'll deal with your non social practical environment collegue unawareness dissolution procedural efficiences

I'm not spikey about this at all. I'm excited by the possibilities of AI and very happy in my role/career. I feel sorry for people that aren't.

 

[Gwladys St. Glory]

Am no expert on sealers but one brand I find quite good is Sika natural stone sealer, another one might be Easy Seal, both of them are water based and its best to apply two coats

Ok, thx..I'm thinking I can get some quartz sand and lightly sprinkle that on after I apply to get the added grip I'm looking for and go for a skateboard grip tape kinda' traction. I just don't want to think I'm being clever and balls it up, I'll have to try and bum a test slab off the dealer to try that first.

 

[LostLegend]

The music industry is going to be in for some upheaval in the coming years.
The speed in which AI music is progressing is genuinely scary.
I made a thread a while back with some joke songs on if anyone remembers.

There's still some way to go. The mixing often seems a bit off in these tracks (a by product of how the learning algorithms are being utilised at the moment) and they can't as yet offer high quality, separate stems (the multi-tracks such as separate drum, bass, vocal channels)
There are tools that can do that after the fact, but there is a loss in quality... for now.

But it's only a matter of time - record labels and the music listening public are going to have a hard time parsing what is made by a human and what is not.

Here's an AI track posted on a music forum I post on, for this genre, it's honestly not far off at all.



This one as well:

𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚕𝚕

Listen and make your own on Suno.

suno.com

 

[Cake]

I work in Projects, and we are encouraged to use it.

I mainly use it for checking emails before I send them to either senior management or suppliers. I like it as it can be very useful.

Outside of the workplace I use it to create pics of my mates to ridicule them for stuff they've said in the past, then stick them on the WhatsApp group. One of the lads said years ago that he once saw a UFO, so most of them are UFO/alien related. Which I think is what AI was really meant for.

I once sent an email to a senior management team with "Retards" as the salutation instead of "Regards". Move the "g" away from the "t" FFS...

 

[Prevenger17]

I work in an administrative job, but it's the civil service in Ireland. We're only just discovering Windows 95, so I think I'm safe for a few more decades yet