• Aggravationstation@feddit.uk
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    I work for a fairly big IT company. They’re currently going nuts about how generative AI will change everything for us and have been for the last year or so. I’m yet to see it actually be used by anyone.

    I imagine the new Microsoft Office copilot integration will be used only slightly more than Clippy was back in the day.

    But hey, maybe I’m just an old man shouting at the AI powered cloud.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      6 months ago

      The problem with GenAI is the same as any system. Garbage in equals garbage out. Couple it with no tuning and it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Good GenAI can exist, but you need some serious data science and time to tune it. Right now that puts the cost outside of the “do it by hand” realm (and by quite a bit). LLMs are useful given that they’ve been trained on general human writing patterns, but for a company to be able to replace their functions with highly specific tasks they need to develop and push their own data sets and training which they don’t want to spend the money on.

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      I’m yet to see it actually be used by anyone.

      None of your programmers are using genAI to prototype, analyze errors or debug faster? Either they are seriously missing out or you’re not following.
      I think the “AI will revolutionize everything” hype is stupid, but I definitely get a lot of added productivity when coding with it, especially when discovering APIs. I do have to double-check, but overall I’m definitely faster than before. I think it’s good at reducing the mental load of starting a new task too, because you can ask for some ideas and pick what you like from it.

      • shastaxc@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        6 months ago

        Mine aren’t. Because it has been mandated by the execs not to because there is a potential security risk in leaking our code to AI servers.

        • stufkes@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          6 months ago

          This. I am stunned to read how many devs are allowed to use a third party tool to send proprietary code to.

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            6 months ago

            There are company agreements to secure that, we are not using the public websites.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          My company has an agreement with a genAI provider so the data won’t be leaked, we have an internal website, it’s not the public one. We can also add our own data to the model to get results relevant to the company’s knowledge.

    • EatATaco@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      6 months ago

      I’m a developer with about 15 years of experience. I got into my company’s copilot beta program.

      Now maybe you are some magical programmer that knows everything and doesn’t need stack overflow, but for me it’s all but completely replaced it. Instead of hunting around for a general answer and then applying it to my code, I can ask very explicitly how to do that one thing in my code, and it will auto generate some code that is usually like 90% correct.

      Same thing when I’m adding a class that follows a typical pattern elsewhere in my code…well it will auto generate the entire class, again with like 90% of it being correct. (What I don’t understand is how often it makes up enum values, when it clearly has some context about the rest of my code) I’m often shocked as to how well it knew what I was about to do.

      I have an exception thats not quite clear to me? Well just paste it into the copilot chat and it gives a very good plain English explanation of what happened and generally a decent idea of where to look.

      And this is a technology in it’s infancy. It’s only been released for a little over a year, and it has definitely improved my productivity. Based on how I’ve found it useful, it will be especially good for junior devs.

      I know it’s in, especially on lemmy, to shit on AI, but I would highly recommend any dev get comfortable with it because it is going to change how things are done and it’s, even in its current form, a pretty useful tool.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        6 months ago

        It’s in to shit on AI because it’s ridiculously overhyped, and people naturally want to push back on that. Pretty much everyone agrees it’ll be useful, just not replace all the jobs useful.

        And a chunk of the jobs it will replace were on their way out the door anyway. There are already plenty of fast food places with kiosks to order, and they haven’t replaced any specific person, just a small function of one job.

        I expect it’ll be useful on the order of magnitude of Google Search, not revolutionary on the scale of the internet. And I think that’s a reasonable amount of credit.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      6 months ago

      I think it massively depends on what your job is. I know quite a lot of people at work use AI to to draft out documents, it’s a good way to get started. I also suspect that quite a lot of documents are 100% AI since we have a lot of stuff that we write but no one ever reads, so what’s the point in putting effort in?

      I tried to use it to write some documentation for various processes at work but the AI doesn’t know about our processes and I couldn’t figure out a way to tell it about our processes and so it either missed steps or just made stuff up so for me it’s not really useful.

      So it works as long as you don’t need anything too custom. But then we have engineers that go out to businesses and presumably they don’t use AI for anything because there’s nothing it can do that would be useful for them.

      So right there in one business you have three groups of people, people who use AI a lot, people who’ve tried to use AI and don’t find it useful, and people who basically have no use for AI.

    • VodkaSolution @feddit.itOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      6 months ago

      I’d love a boosted Clippy powered by AI! It would have incredible animations while sitting there in corner doing nothing!