My Thoughts on AI
The Gist
I really don’t feel like AI belongs in any production environment. There has been no case of an AI generating something that I would be comfortable shipping with. Text models lack the human element that makes them feel real, repeat many phrases or words in a very robotic manner. Image models require too much training on copy written material to be feasible, most of the time it’d be much easier to just do the art or take the picture you want. I find AI in its current state, better as a toy, it shouldn’t be taken seriously, and isn’t worth spending money on.
Do I use any for my content?
I use LLMs for generating the “Summary” content of pages that you find on the indexes of pages, but not the page content itself. Most of the time it’s not even good enough for that, but it’s nice for a quick first draft, especially when I had to populate many pages with that data.
The problems
Stunted learning opportunities
For me, learning is the goal in any project I work on, and I feel like many AI “solutions” completely circumvent having to learn the skill they bludgeon to death in their outputs. This is something I regularly experienced when trying out image generation models, where something is just “a little off” in their outputs, or there’s some kind of style I want to enforce that isn’t based on some existing artist’s style. Having to regenerate, inpaint, or whatever to adjust styles takes so much time that I know that it would’ve been more efficient and easier to just learn how to do the art myself.
Training data
I alluded to this before, but due to image generation models being trained on art without the artist’s consent, it makes their output dubious at best. I wouldn’t feel comfortable using any image generation’s output in a production setting.
Unjustified confidence
For text based models, output tends to be very very confident about its output. As humans, we’re susceptible to anyone or thing being that confident about themselves and just take things at face value. This can cause catastrophic problems as we go on, taking in incorrect information as fact. We used to live in a world where we could simply Google to verify if our sources were correct, but now that Google integrates AI into its results, it’s just as shitty.