AI Lunacy

I’m a tool ho.

I’ve been using them since I was a kid. I remember me and one of my friends doing something stupid with his dad’s tools and being reprimanded. The old man told us to use the proper tool, the way it was intended. We may have been hitting nails with his pipe wrench or something just as stupid. Some tools – like a cordless drill/driver make some tasks super easy. But for others, maybe a standard screwdriver is the better choice.

I have an old friend – old as in nearly 80, that’s still a handyman. He was remodeling the kitchen in the last house I owned. He used that damn cordless for everything – screws on an electrical outlet, that kind of thing. I don’t think I saw him use an actual screwdriver the whole time. I found this fixing a ceiling fan in this place. Whoever installed it did the same thing, using a cordless to put the fan together, leaving most of the Chinesium screws smoked tight, and others utterly stripped and wasted.

AI is like this.

It’s a tool. It can do some decent things. But some tasks are so simple or useless, doing it the old way is more efficient. One of my coworkers made a script to do a final check on formatting and template use. So he exports the content, which is in an AI tool, to a word doc. Stuffs the word doc in CoPilot and has it tuned up. Then, imports it back.

Huh?

For me, I follow the many standards we have, and send it to review. Why? Because it’s going to end up in framemaker, where you will have to reformat the whole thing again using a different template. I’d rather convert the end product and let the reviewers nitpick it. They’re gonna do it anyhow, no matter what. Why do all that work?

So another one sent a script we can use to generate a social media post. We have an excel spreadsheet for this. You have to fill out some fields. You give two 30 word summaries – “Try this to boost your skills and make your ancestors proud!” Something along those lines. You also add a few hashtags. All the rest is in the planning document and has to match.

So, behold! a script:

I blurred it on purpose. What it says is immaterial. It’s 295 words.

A 295 word script, which now you’ll have to feed other docs, all to generate two 30 word blurbs and a handful of hashtags. I don’t get it. The dude is pretty sharp, but that’s over the top for me. How long did it take to craft and test? You can’t sum up work that you’ve been immersed in for months in a handful of sentences? To me, this task is almost an afterthought. I pull up the old one, gussy up the wording, and send it along.

It’s cool he shared it. I can’t see me spending the time to have Copilot do a simple task, and me have to clean up the output anyhow.

Not to be bested, another colleague shared one to generate a script for our magic AI video creation tool. It’s 300+ words. Here’s the deal, you are demoing the steps that you’ve already written and tested. You can copy/paste that into the tool. It’ll bust it up into a dozen scenes, which you record with screen capture. You have to view it all anyhow. You’ll inevitably have to fix timing, and correct callouts.

Not saving a ton of time, if any.

AI has it’s use. I’ve used it for checking my resume and other verification tasks. I also use it as a deeper search when I’m trying to find info. But for simple, trivial, or tasks where you have to be involved anyhow, I find it a waste of time.

I know highly skilled software engineers that find it more trouble than it’s worth. Sure, it’ll write code. But what it produces will force you to go through line by line to make sure it’s correct and doing what you want – and only what you want.

I will say, the more that companies want you to use it, the more people will be dropped or miss it entirely. You see, you need to describe in detail what you want, in clear english. Many will be left without a seat.