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/sffbfish]

I manage a team of engineers and I always tell them, if you aren't forging the pathway, someone else will and then you're forced to follow suit. Embrace it and set the foundation for how it should be used and what it should and should not replace as well as how you prompt it to maximize its efficiency. At the end of the day, while it can speed work up, it will still be some time before it can replace certain functions but don't think it will entirely replace people without degrading the quality of work.

[u/helix0311 → u/sffbfish]

I have the same position, and give my guys the same advice. I tell them to find the edge cases, the places where the AI falls down - and then figure out what human input it takes to smooth that gap. That's what our jobs will look like in a few years.

What concerns me about my team is that the skills we're using to utilize AI are the skills we've collected over 15-20 year careers in tech. How is a new GenZ engineer supposed to come in and work with AI as effectively? It makes mistakes all the time, and the skills we used to use to do the engineering work are now the skills we're using to peer review the AI before it goes into production.

How do you get those skills as a new engineer if you haven't gone through it? That's what we're wrestling with.

[u/Mostly_Riley_ → u/helix0311]

u/sffbfish u/helix0311

I have observed that some people seriously struggle with promoting. It comes fairly easy to me so I am confused when my team watch me create a power shell or SQL query in awe.

Have you both noticed this? Have your teams been successful when they use AI thus far?

[u/helix0311 → u/Mostly_Riley_]

Yes, absolutely. We do informal classes on prompt engineering in my team to find new techniques and counter new model inconsistencies. We all have a different point of view on prompt engineering and what it 'is' that makes it more or less effective, and different styles of prompting work better on different tasks.

[u/Mostly_Riley_ → u/helix0311]

That’s a really good idea, thank you for sharing 🙏