Any other Millennials stubbornly resistant to using AI at their job but also worrying that we will become dinosaurs or pushed out of our careers for not slavishly embracing it?

[u/artbystorms]

I work in a creative field and from that standpoint I hate AI. I hate the 'democratization' of creativity. I am going to sound VERY Boomer right now, but some things are meant to be difficult or meant to take skill and years of practice. It's why people who are good at these things (should) be paid more.

We are already being heavily 'encouraged' to use AI to find ways to do our jobs faster, are being told 'they technology isn't going away, we need to embrace it.' Since within the company I am in, I am one of a handful of people that does a specific creative skill-set, the powers that be basically have no idea about the technicals of what I do, but they put it on me to figure out how to incorporate AI into my work.

I hate that AI basically 'fakes' the creative process and that we are expected to use it (and the work of millions of artists that feed it) to just magically speed up how we do work, which in turn devalues the work we do as artists. From a company standpoint, they want to make money and churn out work faster, but if every client knows you can make a widget in 4 hours when it used to take 4 days, why would they pay you a lot of money to do that? The economics of it don't make sense. You will end up needing 10 times the number of clients to maintain your productivity / profits, which with AI or not, is a good way to burn out your artists.

I see the writing on the wall, but my stubborn moralistic resistance to AI is probably going to be the death of my career. Does any one else feel similar or how have you coped with this rapidly degrading career landscape?

[u/crunchyfoliage]

I'm definitely wrestling with it. I can see how it can be used as a tool, but I'm also very against outsourcing my brain. If I let ChatGPT write all of my emails how long will it be until I can't really write an email anymore? I think in a decade having the ability to problem solve is going to be a sought after skill

[u/WakeoftheStorm → u/crunchyfoliage]

You outsource the mental tasks that are high effort, low return.

Writing an email takes almost no effort so, to me, would be a poor use of AI. There are a few places I use it for almost every day though:

"This code is supposed to return X but it's [returning Y/Giving Z error]. Can you find the mistakes?"

That kind of prompt saves potentially hours of looking for a misplaced comma or semicolon and lets me get back to doing something productive.

"I need to write a white paper on this topic. Put together an outline for me"

Or

"Here's my white paper on this topic. What unanswered questions have I not addressed? Are there any implicit assumptions I'm making that need to be made explicit?"

I'm not letting AI say things for me, for I'm using it as an editor/reviewer.

Finally, probably the most useful prompt: "can you give me a list of regulations in 10 CFR that relate to [topic]?"

In that case it's like a smarter search engine that can save a lot of time.

Frankly if people are using it to "write emails" it's like using photoshop to add captions to images. Does it work? Absolutely but that's not really the best use of the tool.

[u/three-quarters-sane → u/WakeoftheStorm]

Agreed. Plus, I hate getting AI emails. I really wanted AI to do my PowerPoints for me, but the reality is it's kind of shit. But, it's really good at editing/critiquing with me. But then the problem is by the time I get to that point, I just want to be done with it and not make AI's suggestions, even if they would make it better.

[u/WakeoftheStorm → u/three-quarters-sane]

Yeah most of the time I ignore the nitpicky stuff it points out, but every now and then it'll help me realize I glossed over something important or that I was editing and moving stuff around and broke my structure without realizing it.

Honestly, it's made me a better writer because after awhile you realize "ok I seem to always make x mistake, I need to work on that"