this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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The more you use generative AI, the less amazing it is. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it, but it really can only impress you when it's talking about a subject you know nothing of. The pictures are terrible, though way better than I could do. The coding is terrible, although it's amazingly fast for similar quality to a junior developer. The prose seems amazing at first, but as you use it over and over you realize it's quite bland and it's continually sort of reverting to a default voice even if it can write really good short passages (specific to ChatGPT-like instruct models here, not seen that with other models).
I've been playing with generative AI for about 5 years, and it has certainly gotten much better in some ways, but it's still just a neat toy in search of a problem it can solve. There's a lot of money going into it in the hope it will improve to the point where it can solve some of the things we really want it to, but I'm not sure it ever reliably will. Maybe some other AI technology, but not LLM.
It saves me 10-20 hours of work every week as a corpo video producer, and I use that time to experiment with AI - which has allowed our small team to produce work that would be completely outside our resources otherwise. Without a single additional breakthrough, we'd be finding novel ways to be productive with the current form of generative AI for decades. I understand the desire to temper expectations, and I agree that companies and providers are not handling this well at all. But the tech is already solid. It's just being misused more often than it's being wielded well.
I don't have the experience to refute that. But I see the same things from developers all the time swearing AI saves them hours, but that's a domain I know well and AI does certain very limited things quite well. It can spit out boilerplate stuff pretty quick and often with few enough errors that I can fix them faster than I could've written everything by hand. But it very much relies on me knowing what I'm doing and immediately recognizing the garbage for what it is.
It does make me a little bit faster at the stuff I'm already good at, at the cost of leading me down some wild rabbit holes on things I don't know so well. It's not nothing, but it's not what I would call professional-grade.
Nobody doubts that it’s useful for helping with bland low-tier work like corpo videos that people are forced to watch to keep their jobs.
I just meant I work for a corporation. I produce videos for marketing, been doing it for 25 years.
Eliza Effect