I have a boss who tells us weekly that everything we do should start with AI. Researching? Ask ChatGPT first. Writing an email or a document? Get ChatGPT to do it.
They send me documents they “put together” that are clearly ChatGPT generated, with no shame. They tell us that if we aren’t doing these things, our careers will be dead. And their boss is bought in to AI just as much, and so on.
I feel like I am living in a nightmare.
My “company” is tiny, and only employs myself 1 colleague, and an assistant. We’re accountants.
We self host some models from huggingface.
We don’t really use these as part of any established workflow. Thinking of some examples …
This week my colleague used a model to prep a simple contract between herself and her daughter where by her daughter would perform whatever chores and she would pay for cello lessons.
My assistant used an AI thing to parse some scanned bank statements, so this one is work related. The alternative is bashing out the dates, descriptions, and amounts manually. Using traditional OCR for this purpose doesn’t really save any time because hunting down all the mistakes and missed decimal places takes a lot of effort. Parsing this way takes about a third of the time, and it’s less mentally taxing. However, this isn’t a task we regularly perform because obviously in the vast majority of cases we can get the data instead of printed statements.
I was trying to think the proper term for an english word which has evolved from some phrase or whatever, like “stearing board” became “starboard”. The Gen AI suggested portmanteau, but I actually think there’s a better word I just haven’t remembered yet.
I had it create a bash one liner to extract a specific section from a README.md.
I asked it to explain the method of action of diazepam.
My feelings about AI are that it’s pretty great for specific niche tasks like this. Like the bash one liner. It took 30 seconds to ask and I got an immediate, working solution. Without Gen AI I just wouldn’t be able to grep whatever section from a README - not exactly a life changing super power, but a small improvement to whatever project I was working on.
In terms of our ability to do our work and deliver results for clients, it’s a 10% bump to efficiency and productivity when used correctly. Gen AI is not going to put us out of a job.