I tested it a little bit to see if it could write a bit of Python code. I didn’t need the code or anything like it. But, bang, 9 seconds and it was done. I tested it and it was spot on.
And then the other day I had one of those “I think this can be done, not sure types of questions”
Yup it, can be done. AI gave me an outline of exactly how to do it. A small amount of code and pushing buttons.
I’m a programmer, I could have sorted it out in a day or two. AI gave me a bullet pointed roadmap in seconds.
I’m almost fifty, and AI is the first important technological innovation that I’m actively hostile to. I’ve not seen it do anything that I like, but I’ve seen it threaten the livelihood of friends, and I’m learning more about its immense energy usage. So, no: I have no desire to use it, and haven’t used it.
CoPilot is built in to Visual Studio but I think mostly I’ve used it for finishing lines with predictive text.
I did have it write some regex for me but it didn’t work. I think I gave bad instructions.
I came up with the idea the other day of me pasting in lines of text from Word documents my clients give me and having it add list HTML around each line. That is a function I have to do on my own a LOT and it’s always clunky. I didn’t think of doing it until I was done with the page but I’ll for sure do it next time.
ETA: Also I am real mad because there’s a mundane 24/7 task that my partner and I have to do manually for our client (whenever requests come in) and it’s the perfect task to train AI to do but the gap between thinking up something AI can do and it actually doing it is monumental. The programming inbetween is what keeps us in business but also what keeps us from having time to do AI shit.
Not only haven’t I used it, I cannot imagine how I could. I did send someone a challenge. Take an ad hoc (and very long) computation from my thesis for dimensions 2, 3, and 4 and generalize it for arbitrary dimensions. I actually did that five years later. I have not heard back and do not expect to.
I dabble with arduinos and other small electronics. I’d love to use AI to write some code for me. However, I just can’t bring myself to give them my cell phone number. Honestly, I’m surprised at how many people have. When I first tried to use it and got that far, I stopped and assumed a lot of other people would have as well.
I don’t have any specific reason, but handing your cell number over to an AI bot just feels like a bad idea.
Unfortunately, almost all of my work would be unsuitable for AI. AI would be almost guaranteed to make a mistake because it wouldn’t understand our policies or procedures, plus, it’s proprietary information and I’d get in trouble for putting it into AI.
I retired from a software engineering career a few years ago, but I was talking to a friend who is still working at my old company. He says the company is strongly encouraging their programmers to use Github Copilot. Apparently they think it makes programmers more productive. They may be right. I tried using the free version a little but it didn’t seem very helpful to me. I suppose I’m now an old dog who can’t learn new tricks.
I’ve used it to write copy for original (human generated) artwork descriptions. I don’t cut and paste, but it’s a great tool for collecting details I might have overlooked.
I also have a meal app that uses AI brilliantly. I take a photo of my meal and it identifies all of the ingredients, portions, calories, and protein, fat, carb, fiber grams. I assume it does this by scouring the web for reference photos. Sometimes it will confuse a brazil nut for an apple slice, but usually it’s spot on.
I use it enough to make it worth my Copilot license at work, and some more.
If I were still primarily a software engineer, I would be using it even more. Copilot is like having a junior developer at your side. You toss scut-work to Copilot and get answers. Then you can show your sage wisdom and say “Did you consider this edge case and that” and Copilot says “You’re right, I have changed the code to account for those edge cases”
It’s pretty darned cool what you can do with it. But you always have to check the results.
I like that I can ask for some complex algorithm and Copilot writes it, and I just have to fit it into the rest of my code after checking the work. A definite time saver.
And I can say “Can you rewrite this Java code in Python” and it does…I am not a Python developer, so that really helps.
My first Truck was a '76 Chevy. I ended up donating it to a science/outdoor school school so it could plow the snow off their parking lot.
That’s very cool. I’m trying to extract myself from my job. 32 years at the same place. I want to leave gracefully though and make sure everyone knows what’s going on.
I’ve used a neural model based voice changer to make a recording of my own voice sound like that of a woman. I used ElevenLabs - the voice actors who contributed the voice samples for training the model are paid on a usage basis.
So I pay per word to run the process on my uploaded audio; part of that process is selection of a named voice that I want to apply - I chose ‘Charlotte’ - and the voice actor who contributed the ‘Charlotte’ template sample gets paid revenue based on the word count in the task I am paying for. This seems pretty equitable to me and I think it actually creates opportunities for decent amateur voice actors.
The reason I did this rather than just hiring a voice actor to read my script is that I had very specific ideas about the delivery of the lines and this would have taken a huge amount of direction and retakes to get done properly; the voice-to-voice process at elevenlabs preserves the nuances of the performance whilst changing the actual voice itself.
Of course! It’s a wonderful technology if you know how to use it. I’ve used it to whip up drafts of emails to clients when I don’t have enough time, or for when I need some idea of structure – it’s really good at that kind of stuff. For personal stuff, I’ve used it to brainstorm ideas for things I was writing, and it performed really well at that. Just having an interactive conversation with it and figuring out different ways I could take the story have been great. Nine times out of ten, it’s pretty meh, but that one idea out of ten is quite helpful. It also is extremely helpful for me when I have “tip of the tongue” syndrome, when I’m trying to figure out a word and can’t quite get to it. It pretty much hits it every time. It’s excellent in that usage.
The technology is absolutely amazing to me. One has to know its limitations and experiment with how to use it to augment your own human intelligence. It is pretty questionable, still, with things like factual information, and anything remotely factual coming out of an AI has to be checked, though it seems to be getting better and better. I’ve definitely noticed way fewer “hallucinations” than two years ago. That said, I do hate how AI has been forced into apps like Google and Instagram, Facebook, and the such. That is not useful to me.
I’m retired from a systems V&V engineering career. I certainly would use it if it works for me. I’d definitely give it a try.
Using AI or not is akin to using power tools versus manual tools. AI will make you much more productive once you know how to use it.
Last year I did a cross-country road trip with my son (because I’m retired). I used AI for part of the planning and my input was something like,
Plan a road trip from Louisville KY to Washington DC taking 3 days with stops focusing on history and natural beauty.
Its output was fantastic and spot on, and we followed the suggested routing. It spit out two destinations we hadn’t considered, Natural Bridge VA and the USS Wisconsin BB-64, and we enjoyed those stops.
AI is a strong tool and I need to find good uses for it in my retired life.
