“AI” is great for first drafts/seeing a different wording, and automating very tedious crap. For instance, I really like taking proposals I write, dropping them into ChatGPT and saying “write me a 200 word executive summary,” then taking whatever it spits out to start making my own.
“Co-pilot” is a great way of thinking about it. I have no idea if that actual product is any good, but I know when I started thinking of AI tools as kind of a copilot of sorts, it made a lot more sense to me. It illustrates the limitations as well. Though I’d say more it’s more accurately “assistant to the pilot.” If you take me out of the seat, it can’t drive the vehicle and everyone will be upset with the results
Too many companies are falling for the loudest marketing in the room when it comes to AI. They see a shiny, perfectly curated demo and go “huh that seems neat we should do it” regardless of its relevance. They’re looking for shiny features and add-ons. What they should be thinking about is the very tedious, particularly manual tasks that eat up an inordinate amount of their time on a weekly basis. The AI solutions they should be looking for are ones that reduced or eliminate those tasks.
AI can be very useful at saving time. Too many people are using it as a solution in search of a problem. I think the best application for AI involve our day-to-day work, not consumer facing solutions.
That’s honestly why I have liked how AI has been introduced into the production world. I’ve talked about it in a few comments over the last few weeks, but my god it really is making my job so much easier in some respects. It’s also allowing me to salvage audio that a few years ago I would’ve forced people to reshoot. I’m able to do cleanup work in a few hours that would have taken me at least a week a few years ago as well. It’s truly something to behold
I’ve converted overprocessed, mediocre audio from zoom with basically no bitrate to note into something that sounds like it was recorded in a studio environment. We’re talking a few minutes of work to completely overhaul one to two hours of spoken word audio. It’s unbelievable.
You know how there are so many jokes about “enhance“ with video mostly because anybody who’s remotely looked into it knows it’s not really possible? In the audio world, that shit is reality now.
Whenever we say some work is going to be difficult and time consuming now, management reflexively ask if we can fix it with AI. It’s like an excitable little kid getting a bicycle for their birthday and wanting to do everything on their bicycle now, including eating, sleeping and homework.
making them better would mean more work, stress and ill conceived requirements for the programmers. I'm more in favor of marketing thrashing about on their own.
I'm NOT OK with marketing thrashing around... That's EXACTLY how you end up with a product that's sold on feature 'Y' when it only has feature 'y' implemented or planned for.
If you look back at the sci-fi movies that came out soon after lasers were invented, you could see that people had all sorts of crazy ideas of what a laser could be used to do and that a lot of them had absolutely no idea of what a laser really did. Ultimately, we've found out that most of those imagined uses were pure bullshit or extremely impractical, at least with the current state of the technology. It didn't mean that the technology was useless. We ended up finding all sorts of useful purposes for it that they had never imagined, like disk players or barcode scanners. It only means that it took time for people to better understand what the real world applications of the new technology was and a lot of the initial assumptions were dead wrong.
AI is going through the same process. It will take time before the technology's strengths and weaknesses are better understood by the masses so it can be better applied to more realistic uses. And for the commercialization of snake-oil applications for it remains confined to fringe markets.
It's sad that the best most startups can hope for is to be bought by a giant corporation. Not a lot of people are interested in just having a successful long-term business.
The problem is that the areas us consumers would want it is not going to be place that companies put it. They're gunning as hard as they can to monetize and minimize costs. Not what is most useful