Light Finds a Way - AI Can Be Good
Today to my surprise I had a different RMT as my regular one had resigned. This meant going to a new and different room which as a creature of habit is disconcerting. Around the half way point of the massage the RMT asked me to flip over and to my surprise there was a constellation of strange and intriguing light patterns in the ceiling (I wasn't high, honest). I could see light pouring in around the sprinkler system, an intricate pattern around the speakers pumping in the spa music, and various slivers where the ceiling tiles were not perfectly aligned.
The light was finding a way in and it made me think that even though times may get tough and we may not like change good will triumph in the end. The wars in Ukraine and Iran will come to an end. The horrific Trump era will come to an end. Women will get equal pay! I think this also applies to AI and I believe that puts me in the minority from what I've observed in the Bear blogging community via the discover tab so far.
This post is partially a response to/inspired by our workplace LLM mass delusion. If you have time I'd recommend reading it first.
It is frustrating that a cash strapped organization quickly found resources for this but they must believe it is potentially a game changer, even existential perhaps. Most organizations and IT departments struggle to properly implement even battle-tested-tried-and-true technologies well. This technology is new and like all technology will both improve exponentially over time but also organizations, teams, and individuals will adapt and learn how to better implement and make use of it.
For me as someone who never got deep into the weeds technically the implementation of chatGPT has been liberating. In the past I'd have to go to an analyst who understands very little about our business to be frank but knows how to write queries. The analyst would schedule me in to their work and a few days later I'd get a report. Inevitably the report would be flawed in some major way or lack columns I didn't specify or were misinterpreted. Now with chatGPT I can get this report in a matter of seconds on a Friday night at 11PM. Due to the nature of what my teams do every transaction is logged and for me this alone makes the monthly license valuable. With one prompt I can have chatGPT send me that report regularly as well.
Just this afternoon a branch sent me some data as a PDF and somehow it was basically pictures of pages, not selectable text. We had to align this data with hand written notes from another source. Both files were dropped into a prompt and a few seconds later we had a spreadsheet! I can also ask chatGPT to find files in SharePoint, summarize my email, and best of all highlight any Teams messages I have not responded to and should. I feel like it is one of those things where the more you use it the more evident the use cases become. I believe it is costing my company around $30/mth and based on my hourly wage it is saving them that much or more daily.
Beyond Bear on the web at large I keep seeing thought pieces about AI killing art, AI killing blogging, AI replacing jobs. In my opinion all new technology displaces labour, my hope is that it means humans can work on more valuable and satisfying work. That Analyst who no longer needs to work on my reports should in theory be working on much more valuable tasks to help us have better business intelligence and better datasets to query right?
One thing I've learned from my career so far is that change means opportunity. Try to embrace the change, learn what you can from it, and leverage it to get what you want from your employer. If AI is the magic buzzword of the moment and you want something licensed highlight that it has AI, that conference you want to go to simply needs the AI sessions highlighted as well.
To bring this full circle I'm very fortunate that my company benefits are just enough to cover one massage a month. I slept on this benefit for several years but now take full advantage of it. Check your benefits and do the same, you won't regret it, I promise, but try not to think about AI while you are in the spa!
ps: I feel very different about AI personally. I have Claude on my phone but am paranoid and do each chat in incognito mode and never give it personal information. I do not use AI to write any content on this blog as I believe is obvious by the terrible title I could not improve on.
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