My last post was two sentences about subscriptions. Seems I was somewhat right: SaaS is the norm and AI / large language models are everywhere.
My opinion on these developments? Technology is a tool, not a solution. You use it to help with your work. It’s still up to you to solve your problem. Nothing can replace critical thinking and problem-solving. Tech is a tool, and if you let it replace too much, you’ll have more problems than you started with.
Do I use AI? Yes, but in very specific ways. For example, I had years of financial data that I knew the contents of, but hadn’t sat down to pull all the analysis I could from it. With a paid subscription, I used the tool to review the data, requesting specific pieces. I also asked for a report detailing how those conclusions were reached. What would have taken me a week only took days.
Days? Yes, days as I had to review everything and see how much of it I could replicate. I needed to understand the conclusions and clearly communicate the information. If I hadn’t spent the time understanding it, the conclusions would be useless.
I also use Grammarly to help write emails. I write way too fast and often miss things like “the,” “to,” and “of.” I avoid using the rephrase tool too often and will re-read a sentence when it highlights something (the number of times I’ve realized the sentence doesn’t actually say what I wanted it to… embarrassing).
Am I using it properly? Who knows, but after using it, I feel like I have a better footing to have an opinion. That opinion is this:
People are treating AI like it’s everything when it’s simply a tool that should be used for certain tasks and not for others. It can’t be creative – it can only do what it’s been told, as much as people would like it to be otherwise. I see it more like when computers were introduced to the workplace. Things will change, missteps will happen, and new norms will be developed.
What will change things the most is when the actual compute time costs are passed on to the consumer. How will that affect AI usage?
Finally, we need to consider whether this is worth all the environmental issues. This is a big one. Right now, I don’t think we need all the infrastructure that’s in the works. We should be more considerate when planning a data centre, and not push it through just because it’s an AI-related project.