As a software developer, I can attest that AI does hallucinate a lot. Using it for programming is oftentimes hit and miss. I would never trust it with business logic, but I've found it's extraordinarily helpful in writing unit tests and UI. It's also helpful with complex SQL queries, regular expressions and so forth. Using it for targeted problems like that is the most beneficial. Don't ever expect to write an entire app and have it be stable and secure.. this "vibe coding" trend is ridiculous.
A book that I thought would take months to write was in first draft mode in days with Claude. But I found it did make up events that never took place and when called out for it, apologized.
Agreed that AI definitely has a multi-order-of-magnitude greater impact in the creative arts than code. It's democratized music even more than pro tools, it will make CG movies doable for merely hundreds of thousands instead of tens of millions in the near future, bringing down the cost of the soundtrack too. So far my coding has benefited, but no where near those kind of efficiency gains, I don't have AI touching anything in production or hard data, currently I have it spitting out the bricks of the solutions I've designed so there could be more potential gains I'll find soon enough.
Vox have you seen AI's impact for writing non-fiction, or is the re-checking not make it worth it?
As far as it saving time or not for programmers, or many other tasks; it depends how you use it. There are times it definitely has saved me time and other times it has sent me on a wild goose chase. Using it for research is a mixed bag, as it can make things up, but a lot of times in the programming/IT world those answers are close enough, and better and quicker than a stack overflow site. A lot of times it makes things possible that weren't before, rather than making things quicker. And of course the better you are to begin with, the better it helps you. A bad author isn't going to be able to take full advantage of AI, because "write me a book" is not how it works. Sometimes it doesn't do things the way you want and you can spend more time editing than you would have just writing a part yourself, but most of the time it's pretty good.
I’m a writer in the healthcare field, and yesterday was experimenting with AI prompts.
When I asked it to summarize the methodology section of a research paper, what it gave me was about a disease not in the paper and there was no mention of the two diseases that were.
If you need AI to confabulate for you, you’re golden. If you need it to be strictly honest and logical, of course all the double checking and re-querying is going to slow you down, not to mention the annoyance factor.
Time "wasted" is only wasted when you assume it must be productive otherwise. Big assumption, that. Much effort is required to make use of new tools, see where they fit in your processes. Few are truly drop-in replacements with immediate productivity gains.
Science but literally everything is made up
The level of complex instructions which must be consistently maintained in programming is just not there in most other use cases.
As a software developer, I can attest that AI does hallucinate a lot. Using it for programming is oftentimes hit and miss. I would never trust it with business logic, but I've found it's extraordinarily helpful in writing unit tests and UI. It's also helpful with complex SQL queries, regular expressions and so forth. Using it for targeted problems like that is the most beneficial. Don't ever expect to write an entire app and have it be stable and secure.. this "vibe coding" trend is ridiculous.
A book that I thought would take months to write was in first draft mode in days with Claude. But I found it did make up events that never took place and when called out for it, apologized.
AI to help edit a short story is great. AI to help design an antenna. Mixes up speed of light between feet and meters.
Wait untill the lawyers argue about AI promts in court.
I call upon congress to requre the AI promp labling on all med bottels.
Agreed that AI definitely has a multi-order-of-magnitude greater impact in the creative arts than code. It's democratized music even more than pro tools, it will make CG movies doable for merely hundreds of thousands instead of tens of millions in the near future, bringing down the cost of the soundtrack too. So far my coding has benefited, but no where near those kind of efficiency gains, I don't have AI touching anything in production or hard data, currently I have it spitting out the bricks of the solutions I've designed so there could be more potential gains I'll find soon enough.
Vox have you seen AI's impact for writing non-fiction, or is the re-checking not make it worth it?
Don’t forget AI voicework in videogames and videogame mods.
"One author with whom I am acquainted has increased his writing output by a factor of 5x."
Dang that's a sweet increase. What was the gain mainly in?
My book writing sped up by at least log10.
Used lecture transcripts of my class, had written to prose, and now I am working through them to make it publishable.
Saving literal years.
Even consider the time to learn local models (6 months) thats less time than it took me to write the first chapter organically.
As far as it saving time or not for programmers, or many other tasks; it depends how you use it. There are times it definitely has saved me time and other times it has sent me on a wild goose chase. Using it for research is a mixed bag, as it can make things up, but a lot of times in the programming/IT world those answers are close enough, and better and quicker than a stack overflow site. A lot of times it makes things possible that weren't before, rather than making things quicker. And of course the better you are to begin with, the better it helps you. A bad author isn't going to be able to take full advantage of AI, because "write me a book" is not how it works. Sometimes it doesn't do things the way you want and you can spend more time editing than you would have just writing a part yourself, but most of the time it's pretty good.
It seems like AI is most useful in the creative fields and much less so for fact-based applications.
Yes, because it's good at making up stuff.
Haa!
I’m a writer in the healthcare field, and yesterday was experimenting with AI prompts.
When I asked it to summarize the methodology section of a research paper, what it gave me was about a disease not in the paper and there was no mention of the two diseases that were.
If you need AI to confabulate for you, you’re golden. If you need it to be strictly honest and logical, of course all the double checking and re-querying is going to slow you down, not to mention the annoyance factor.
Time "wasted" is only wasted when you assume it must be productive otherwise. Big assumption, that. Much effort is required to make use of new tools, see where they fit in your processes. Few are truly drop-in replacements with immediate productivity gains.