SoftwareAI

 

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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  ALL
43086.1 
I'm retired, but I worked for nearly 40 years in IT so I have an interest in AI. I don't want to get into the philosophy of AI. There's no room and no time here. I'm guessing there's mainly an IT literate community here, so my questions are: is it useful? Is it dangerous? Is it bollox?

My experience has been mixed. I've done a lot of work with a range of AI video products, specifically in enhancing existing video. I've also done a fair amount with ChatGPT and a couple of similar products on literary projects. In both of theses areas my results have been wildly variable. Sometimes amazed, sometimes disappointed, and sometimes neither (which often means disappointed but not necessarily by the software).

Any opinions, seeing as the great Keir Starmer is promising to attach the UK directly to the motherlode?
 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43086.2 In reply to 43086.1 
Not yet, very, definitely.

The problem with ChatGPT/Gemini/etc is that they are just language processing; they aren't intelligent and don't actually understand the input nor output, they merely plug words together with no comprehension and confidently present the resulting misinformation.

Sometimes they randomly plagiarize the right combination of sources and can impress people, and that makes them even more dangerous.

I saw a brief bit of what I think was the Q&A after Keir Starmer's no-doubt-super-charismatic announcement. Seemed to me that nobody in the room had any idea what they were talking about, but I'm concerned about what data the UK government is going to be handing over and to who, but have had too much other stuff going on to look into it yet.

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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43086.3 In reply to 43086.1 
I've got very mixed feelings.

On one hand, it's just another tool and you noted a few places where can be useful.

On the other hand, I agree with everything Pete said.

I'm not on board with "automation bad". Automation's great, *so long as* the fruits of that automation are shared out and not collected at the top. And so long as we're not automating all the fun stuff and leaving the boring stuff for humans.

I do wonder why, if you show me the exact same image, and tell me it's produced by AI rather than human effort, I value it far less. I think it's something to do with valuing the labour that went into something. But then I remember reading artists during the renaissance bemoaning other artists who didn't grind their own pigments and make their own paints and wonder whether I'm just doing that.

Fundamentally I think it's a tool like any other, it'll have uses, but I don't trust capitalists to correctly identify those actual good uses.

There are probably public arenas where AI could be very useful. Feed it everyone's (anonymised) travel data and get it to optimise train and bus routes/times for minimum journey length and waiting times and stuff like that. But then it's a black box and you've got to be *really* careful about what it's basing its decisions on.

Like, I'll link the video where I learned of this, somebody was trying to use AI to distinguish between TB and just a chest infection (or something along those lines) based on X-rays. Which is quite hard for humans. The AI was a bit better than humans, but it's important to work out what it's spotting, which involves a load of A/B testing. After lots of testing they eventually worked out that the AI was just leaning TB if the date of the X-ray was earlier.

My reading of the Starmer stuff is that it's all coming from Blair's foundation. And Blair's son is some AI company something or other. So I don't trust it for a second.

After decades of no productivity growth and when you're ideologically incapable of doing things like public investment and having an industrial policy, AI, since no one really knows what it is, can look like a magic solution. Or at least look like something you can convince the public is a magic solution enough to get you to the next election.

So in a nutshell - a tool like any other, we've not really figured out what it's for yet or how to use it. And I don't trust capitalists with it. Oh, and it might just not be worth the energy cost.

Good video:




 
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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43086.4 In reply to 43086.1 
This is a pretty good explainer: https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/

AI has (reportedly) proven itself helpful in certain use cases (science, medicine).* In cultural applications, the copyright thing is a deal breaker, and the idea that corporate smurfs are going to start firing AI-generated bumpf back and forth at each other is both hilarious and probably true. Energy consumption is off the charts stupid, so that kind of negates the entire "intelligence" angle right there.

*also, it's a great excuse for precision carpet bombing (the AI did it!).
“Can I survive for 24 hours without GPS navigation?”
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43086.5 In reply to 43086.3 
And I tend to agree with what you all say. Using public money to fund it is another matter. The Labour party has been quite up front in that they think it will enable them to reduce the size of the Civil Service. My prediction is that it will actually add to the complexity with which the Civil Service deals, but the government (what ever flavour is in power when the decisions are made) will reduce the size of the Civil Service anyway. Since the areas which will be reduced in this way will, inevitably, be those dealing with public provision - welfare, public planning, taxation, the NHS etc. - these will become even more inefficient, intractable, and other words beginning with "in".

Clearly, this will will provide another way in for private provision of public services. It will seem to be simply a logical extension of the existing system, since private companies will be the principal beneficiaries of all the investment in AI and "best placed" to handle what is "not core business".

This pessimism aside, it is blindingly obvious that the small coterie of not-especially-bright people around Starmer have seized on AI as something new and SEXY that all the big boys are playing with. It's such a no-brainer for them to give the thumbs up to investment. In truth, if they all spent a month being educated about what it does and what it is actually capable of, they would be no nearer having any real understanding of what it is. It convinces me even more (if I needed it) that our present bunch of leaders, and this is world-wide, would have to pull their socks up and work flat out to even be considered third rate.

 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43086.6 In reply to 43086.5 
Yeah it'll be another mechanism to erode public services and trust in them, for sure.

And I don't think it'll even be intentional. It'll just be what seems like the natural course of events to the dumb fucks bringing it about.

At least Thatcher was doing it intentionally.
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 From:  Monsoir (PILOTDAN)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43086.7 In reply to 43086.1 
I've had a subscription to ChatGPT since basically Day 1. On one hand I love it, it's really clever, on the other hand.....wow, it can be crap at times.

For me, it's become a secondary form of Google search most of the time - it's pretty good for pointing you towards things that you dont' even know where to start.

On the other hand, it loves a good hallucination and will send you down an utter rabbit hole if you let it. Most of my job is doing "weird" stuff - i.e., developing things that aren't well defined or well solved on the internet, so I have to be really really careful trusting GPT.

I once spent hours trying to get something working that it signposted me towards, only to find out that fundamentally you can't do what it was saying.

It's very very limited, and it terrifies me that people don't understand that
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 From:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)  
 To:  ALL
43086.8 


My experience of AI so far is that it's a convincing liar, unless you ask it to do maths, draw hands, or do anything involving anything that anyone has ever been slightly sarcastic about, ever.

Nevertheless, the company I work for is attempting to incorporate some AI stuff into the product, and while the ability to kick tasks off and get information back by asking questions in natural language looks absolutely great in demos, I'm concerned about how much oversight and checking will be required to make sure things are correct, vs if we just keep using humans.

Kenny
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)     
43086.9 In reply to 43086.8 
I recognise what you and Dan are saying, and it certainly chimes with my experience. Whether it's bizarre shadow artefacts that Topaz AI creates, or ChatGPT making errors in a synopsis (to the extent of inventing plot lines in one case), it's not something I'd want to go all-in with. Which is why I worry about the government's direction. In my experience, the more you ask of the various products, the more likely they are to veer off course. The government sounds like it's intending to ask a huge amount. I anticipate some disasters, a vast waste of money and an awful lot of unhappy people. Hint: those unhappy people won't be the vendors of AI products and services.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  Matt  
 To:  ALL
43086.10 
We have Github CoPilot at work. In my experience it works really well if you use IDE integration and have it suggest complete blocks of code. It is still very dependent on context of course, which as far as I can tell in the case of JetBrains IDE integration is based on files you currently have open, rather than the loaded project. It's certainly a step up from the single variable/type auto-complete us software engineers are more familiar with.

For generation of code based on asking for a solution, it is more hit and miss and does often need the input refined to be able to generate the correct solution, but it's still miles better than doom scrolling Google search results for links to Stack Overflow, which Google is really bad for these days IMO
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  ALL
43086.11 In reply to 43086.10 
Interesting to note that the introduction of AI within the public service (and as anticipated it's social services chosen for the risk and suffering) has not been a huge success so far https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/27/ai-prototypes-uk-welfare-system-dropped
 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43086.12 In reply to 43086.11 
"does the reality of AI match the rhetoric?”

Not even close.
“Prada offers savage, instinctive menswear”
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)     
43086.13 In reply to 43086.12 
Anybiody worried about the chances of AI becoming self aware can relax a little in the knowledge that the developers of OpenAI at least have a predictable lack of insight and self awareness. Reports today suggest they are accusing the Chinese developers of DeepSeek of plagiarism. Without a trace of (understanding of) irony, they claim there is evidence that DeepSeek used OpenAI as a source for training.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43086.14 In reply to 43086.13 
It's an opening gambit to get DeepSeek banned in the U.S. of A., or at least tie it up in the courts.
“Event gives public the chance to experience round tables”
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)     
43086.15 In reply to 43086.14 
Fully justified of course. Those pesky foreigners should have written it like OpenAI where the developers obviously wrote, drew, painted, filmed, sang, spoke every one of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of pieces of work used to train it, without even a hint of plagiarism.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  ANT_THOMAS  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43086.16 In reply to 43086.1 
I keep meaning to try and embrace ChatGPT (and other language models) more to try and figure out and reduce some work or tasks I'm doing.

At work we are very lacking in systems and processes. It's a nightmare. Someone new is trying to introduce a new system/solution which supposedly has some amount of AI.

I'm part of the small initial team on the project and currently the tasks they are looking to wrap in some form of "AI" are pretty simple interactions between systems that absolutely don't require AI. Just calculations based on predefined parameters to save time manually doing them, then feed the result to another system. (an MRP system with automated order sending).

Frustrates me when this phase of the project is claiming some sort of AI use case when it's not really true. Further phases could, but I'd still be very cautious of letting it loose. Probably mainly because a lot of the data being fed in from other parts of the business is generally shite - shit in, shit out.
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  ANT_THOMAS     
43086.17 In reply to 43086.16 
Your situation sounds familiar. So few businesses of any kind pay any serious attention to the early stages in customer interaction (the online or other computer kind). Just thinking a bit about what somebody needs to to enter in a simple initial screen, which may be little more than a menu, and how that screen responds, is like some kind of magic to many people. And yet those tools have been there for years. I used to teach ISPF which is probably the most common way that developers interact with IBM mainframes, and although IBM provided a hugely rich variety of ways of prompting, validating and responding to every field on a menu, it was incredibly hard to get people to make use of them. A few careful decisions and it was easy to build a menu that had much of the functionality that today we would call AI. And probably more secure and fault tolerant.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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