My company is strongly pushing AI. There are lot of experiments, demos, and effort from decently smart people about integrating it into our workflows. There are some impressive victories that have been made with AI tooling producing some things fast. I am not in denial about this. And the SE department is tracking improved productivity (as measured by # of tickets being done, I guess?)
The problem is I hate AI. I hate every fucking thing about it. Its primary purpose, regardless of what utility is gained, is spam. I think it’s obvious how google search results are spam, how spam songs and videos are being produced, etc. But even bad results from AI that have to be discarded, IMO, are spam.
And that isn’t even getting into all massive amounts of theft to train the data, or the immense amounts of electricity it takes to do training and inference, as well as run, all this crap. Nor the psychosis being inflicted onto people who emplace their trust into these systems. Nor the fact that these tools are being used to empower authoritarian regimes to track vulnerable populations, both here (in the USA) and abroad. And all this AI shit serves to enrich the worst tech moguls and to displace people like artists and people like myself, a programmer.
I’m literally being told at my job that I should view myself basically as an AI babysitter, and that AI has been unambiguously proven in the industry, so the time for wondering about it, experimenting with it, or opposing it is over. The only fault and flaw is my (i.e. any given SE’s) unwillingness to adapt and onboard.
Looking for advice from people who have had to navigate similar crap. Because I feel like I’m at a point where I must adapt or eventually get fired.
ai is another abstraction of search. When integrated into software it can perform many things that individual plugins could before but it is one and done. If you had an intern that would prep work for you or look over what you are doing to identify errors you would likely consider yourself lucky but you know you have to evaluate everything they do. Its kinda the same. If you take away the energy usage I would be relatively fine with ai usage. You ask it something. It provides and answer along with references to where it got the information. You can read over the references and if everything looks good you saved yourself some time over a standard search. Personally my writing is way casual and full of bad grammar and misspellings unless I make drafts and review multiple times. ai being able to fix up what I write such that all the spelling and grammar is correct and maybe a bit more polite. thats great.