I was already in the midst of writing a similar post when I saw this pop up on Kev Q's blog so thought I'd save some effort the old-fashioned way and steal it.
1. How was your first experience with AI models?
I first experienced the rise of AI with colourisation models. I used one to colourise an old photo of my grandmother for my mum who was struggling with her grief after she passed away in 2014. The results were impressive and she still displays it on her mantelpiece today.
I used image generation around the time of DALL-E 2, which was rough but made some amusing memes I could share with colleagues at work.
Early chat models were clearly an early BETA at the time, hallucinating to the point of being useful for real work, but I didn't immediately discount them as I could see the potential but I am still surprised by the speed of this advancement.
In hindsight, I probably should've recorded those early experiences in a journal somewhere, they might become amusing anecdotes of our naivety during the first automated war.
2. Do you use AI or are you completely against using it?
I use Claude daily in my work. I am a DevOps engineer and have written Python code every day for years. I still do, but AI has taken over a lot of the hand-writing of code and I'm more of an orchestrator now.
I don't have any strong feelings about it, I think if I had spent decades as a programmer and lived and breathed code I'd feel differently, I get that, but I use code just to get operational tasks done and for that it has accelerated my work timeline beyond belief.
I've learnt from AI but I also worry about skill atrophy. I feel like coding will be like going to the gym in a few years. We used to exercise to survive and hunt, now we do it to stay healthy. When I release open source code, it'll be hand-written, I don't achieve anything by releasing AI slop, but in work it's a different matter. AI has been cited as a reason why roles haven't been backfilled, it's already taking jobs at my employer, and I either ride the wave or get washed about by it, standing on principals would be nice but I've a family to feed.
3. Do you have any preference among different models, for example Claude vs ChatGPT? If yes, how do you choose?
Claude, every time. It's much better for coding tasks and I prefer the way it communicates, I find ChatGPT out of the box quite annoying until I tell it to STFU in the system prompt.
4. What aspect of AI models do you like and what do you not like?
It can help it look like I know what I'm doing, so that's good, I guess.
I don't like how they are being pushed on everyone, I don't like the environmental impact, I don't like the careless disregard for caution that's bitten us all over and over in the past. I'm too old for this again and I'm starting to yearn for an offline life.
5. How do you feel about AI generated images? Does it annoy you if someone uses them in a blog post?
If it's a community organisation advertising a charity fair, it's boring but I'll give it a pass.
If it's used in TV advertising by a large profit-making business who can afford to employ real artists, fuck them.
6. Internet is flooded with AI slop now, full of generated text, images, audio, and videos. How do you filter it from authentic human creation? Do you have a strategy?
It's a whole other post I haven't written, but I'm working hard to detach myself from the modern web for my mental health and wellbeing. Part of that is reading a lot more books by real human authors. I also read a lot more small web and less big web. Blog authors don't seem to use AI for writing, why would they? You'll never see AI slop on my blog, that's not why I write (badly).
7. Are you hopeful for a better future with A.I. or a dystopian one?
Of course I'm hoping for a better one but as always with these things there will be winners and losers and I feel like the winners will be smaller in number than any previous "disruptive" technology. At least with the powered looms it became cheaper to put clothes on your children's backs but what does AI bring us that we genuinely need more than people's livelihoods? The devil makes work for idle hands and AI is making a lot of people redundant, it won't end well.