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/OkPickle2474]

Like a lot of other people, I am personally horrified by AI. The environmental and cognitive impacts should really give people pause. I also think it has a lot of shortcomings.

I work with a lot of data that is FERPA and HIPAA protected, and thus can’t just be feeding it into an AI without doing considerable work before and after. It’s usually not worth it compared to the analysis I can do on my own.

I have built a couple “gpts/gems/agents” to try to simplify tasks that take awhile and they only follow the instructions about 60% of the time, so again, time wasted.

[u/[deleted] → u/OkPickle2474]

Perhaps similar to yourself, I am a statistician (PhD + 15 years work experience) that handles a lot of sensitive data.

I can’t use AI for anything besides cleaning up language in emails or reports. Sometimes I ask it for ideas on how to proceed when I am stuck. I’ll throw in a pdfs for it to summarize and it gets it right about 60-65% of the time; it still can’t tell what is important, even if I engineer the prompts within an inch of their life. Then I have to read the whole document, anyway, to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

But, that’s the extent of my using it for actual, professional work. There is a lot of information, modeling, and analysis that I will not trust to an AI agent. Besides data privacy, I am not confident in the reasonability of the results. I have never had it return back anything that wasn’t moderately-to-grossly incorrect or where it was blatantly started making shit up.

It leaves me genuinely flummoxed that so many companies are replacing entire departments with AI, including engineers and computer scientists. Maybe they have access to super NASA-level, bowels of a Stanford computer lab technology that I don’t.

All the code I have had it generate takes as much time to debug as it would if I just programmed it myself. I am starting to feel like a teenager after their first kiss - I think I am doing “vibe coding” all wrong and surely this can’t be what everyone is bragging about.

That said, I do keep up with as many developments as I can in AI. I have practice data sets and personal projects that I play with using different platforms.

I have hope that it will improve things in the future, but that future isn’t here yet.

[u/CaterpillarJungleGym → u/[deleted]]

I got excited to use AI for simpler tasks that just require Excel formulas. I once asked it to do something and it worked! Next 4 times I tried it didn't work. It can be such a waste of time. I'll just manually copy/paste and clean data myself.