Hello folks. I want to hear your opinions about the advances in AI and how it makes you feel. This is a community about privacy, so I already kind of know that you’re against it, at least when AI is implemented in such a way that it violates peoples’ privacy.

I recently attended a work-related event and the conclusion was that AI will come and change everything in our field. A field which has been generally been dominated by human work, although various software has been used for it. Without revealing too much, the event was for people who with texts. I’m a student, but the event was for people working in the field I plan to work in in the future. The speakers did not talk about privacy concerns (not in detail, at least) or things such as micro work (people who get paid very little to clean illegal content in AI training data, for example).

You probably can guess that that I care about privacy: I’m writing this on Lemmy, for a privacy community. I’m a Linux user (the first distro I used was Ubuntu 10.04) and I transitioned to Linux as my daily driver in November last year. I care about the Open Source community (most of the programs I used on Windows were FOSS). I donate to the programs I use. I use a privacy-respecting search engine, use uBlock and Privacy Badger on Firefox. I use a secure instant messenger and detest Facebook. But that’s where it ends, because I use a stock Android phone. But at least I care about these things and I’m eager to learn more. When it comes to privacy, I’m pretty woke, for the lack of a better word.

But AI is coming, or rather, it’s already here. Granted, people who talked at that event were somewhat biased, as they worked in the AI industry, so even if they weren’t marketing ChatGPT, they were trying to hype up the industry. But apparently, AI can already help so called knowledge workers. It can help in brainstorming and generating ideas. It can produce translations, it can summarize texts, it can give tips…

The bottom line seems to be that I need to start using AI, because either I will use it and keep my job in the future, or I will not use it and risk being made redundant by AI at some point in time.

But I want to get other perspectives. What are your views on AI, and has it affected your job, and if so, how? I know some people have said here that AI is just a bunch of algorithms and that it’s just hype and that the bubble will burst eventually. But until it does, it seems it’ll have a pretty big impact on how things work. Can we choose to ignore it?

  • @Deckweiss
    14•9 months ago

    At the radiology clinic where my dad worked, they had a trial with image recognition trained on detecting stuff in MRI images. The AI would draw a red cirlce around every suspicious place it detected.

    What they noticed is that the doctors started to only look at the red cirlces and would miss a lot more of the non-obvious nuances. Which resulted in more completely wrong diagnosis and a lower diagnosis quality overall.

    So I doubt that it will fix stupid for now. Even if it is implemented as a sanity check review, after the doctor has done his work, they might get more sloppy when relying on the AI check to catch their oversight.

    Afaik the best way to improve quality of a doctors work is longer education and more worktime per patient. Or more rigorous processes where multiple doctors have to give their independent analysis on any patient. But any of that is too expensive for profit oriented commercial clinics.

    Sadly it is more economically viable to diagnose as quickly as possible, let some patients die due to errors and fight a lawsuit, then to employ twice as many highly skilled doctors.