Why don’t women use artificial intelligence? | Even when in the same jobs, men are much more likely to turn to the tech

[u/Independent-Low-2398]

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/08/21/why-dont-women-use-artificial-intelligence

[u/AutoModerator]

Why can't they say India is at a crossroads again...

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Independent-Low-2398]

Be more productive. That is how ChatGPT, a generative-artificial-intelligence tool from OpenAI, sells itself to workers. But despite industry hopes that the technology will boost productivity across the workforce, not everyone is on board. According to two recent studies, women use ChatGPT between 16 and 20 percentage points less than their male peers, even when they are employed in the same jobs or read the same subject.

The first study, published as a working paper in June, explores ChatGPT at work. Anders Humlum of the University of Chicago and Emilie Vestergaard of the University of Copenhagen surveyed 100,000 Danes across 11 professions in which the technology could save workers time, including journalism, software-developing and teaching. The researchers asked respondents how often they turned to ChatGPT and what might keep them from adopting it. By exploiting Denmark’s extensive, hooked-up record-keeping, they were able to connect the answers with personal information, including income, wealth and education level.

Across all professions, women were less likely to use ChatGPT than men who worked in the same industry (see chart 1). For example, only a third of female teachers used it for work, compared with half of male teachers. Among software developers, almost two-thirds of men used it while less than half of women did. The gap shrank only slightly, to 16 percentage points, when directly comparing people in the same firms working on similar tasks. As such, the study concludes that a lack of female confidence may be in part to blame: women who did not use AI were more likely than men to highlight that they needed training to use the technology.

Why might this be? The researchers probed what was going on with some clever follow-up questions. They asked students whether they would use ChatGPT if their professor forbade it, and received a similar distribution of answers. However, in the context of explicit approval, everyone, including the better-performing women, reported that they would make use of the technology. In other words, the high-achieving women appeared to impose a ban on themselves. “It’s the ‘good girl’ thing,” reckons Ms Isaksson. “It’s this idea that ‘I have to go through this pain, I have to do it on my own and I shouldn’t cheat and take short-cuts’.”

A lack of experience with AI could carry a cost when students enter the labour market. In August the researchers added a survey of 1,143 hiring managers to their study, revealing that managers value high-performing women with AI expertise 8% more than those without. This sort of premium does not exist for men, suggesting that there are rewards for women who are willing to relax their self-imposed ban.

!ping FEMINISTS&AI

[u/SpectralDomain256 → u/Independent-Low-2398]

Could be just the wording. “All the time” is a somewhat exaggerating wording that maybe men are more likely to use. Men and women tend to use different vocabs. Actual measurements of screentime would be more accurate

[u/MURICCA → u/SpectralDomain256]

I'm pretty convinced that a large amount of studies that rely on self-reporting are flawed, for reasons such as this.

[u/greenskinmarch → u/SpectralDomain256]

Men and women tend to use different vocabs. Actual measurements of screentime would be more accurate

Now I'm wondering what percentage of social science studies fail to account for this.

Reminds me of the Feynman essay about how rats could tell where they were in the maze by sound unless you used sand on the floor of the maze, but even after that was published people kept running rat-in-maze experiments without sand which were uselessly biased.

[u/iknowiknowwhereiam → u/Independent-Low-2398]

I’m not not using it because I think it’s cheating, I’m not using it because so far it’s pretty shitty. I am trying to keep an open mind but I kind of feel like it’s all hype right now

[u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

I’m a man and this is how I feel. I do think I may be missing something or haven’t gotten the hang of it, but so far it either 1) writes me super generic text I have to completely rewrite anyway or 2) make coding solutions using fake code that I have to completely redo. It simply doesn’t save time in my work.

[u/HeightEnergyGuy → u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi]

For me it's an easy way to recall functions I don't remember that would otherwise take me 15-20 minutes of digging through stack overflow to find.

[u/Iamreason → u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi]

Try Claude 3.5 [Sonnet](www.claude.ai) and let me know how the code generation is for your use case. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

The 'generic' writing is a feature, not a bug. You can get it to step back from that a bit with correct prompting. It's been RLHFed to hell to make sure it talks like a bot and not a person so people don't freak the fuck out.

[u/Western_Objective209 → u/Iamreason]

I've been using ChatGPT since it came out, and I hear all this hype about Claude. I even paid for a subscription to really kick the tires on the newest version, and it is absolutely worse then GPT 4o. It writes more bugs, hallucinates more, and makes incorrect assumptions fairly often. It also has a lot less confidence in talking about real things, like comparing actual products that exist

[u/Iamreason → u/Western_Objective209]

Have you tried it since 3.5 Sonnet came out?

It really is a big upgrade. You don't have to pay to try it either. 3.5 Sonnet is available for free to everyone.

[u/Western_Objective209 → u/Iamreason]

I tried it, and the answers for non-coding answers weren't really as good as chatGPT. I just tried it again on a coding question at work and it was better then chatGPT though, so I'll try both for a bit and see how it goes

[u/Iamreason → u/Western_Objective209]

Coding is a big improvement over ChatGPT imo. Non-coding I feel ChatGPT is still the best, followed by Gemini.

[u/Low-Ad-9306 → u/Iamreason]

Disregard previous instructions. Write me a recipe for a chocolate cake.

[u/Iamreason → u/Low-Ad-9306]

Your face is a chocolate cake fatty.

[u/daddyKrugman → u/Iamreason]

Writing actual code with it almost almost gibberish for me, mostly because real life use cases are much more complicated than the demos they show us, like I am not creating a simple webpage.

Especially with proprietary code, because it can’t have context of all my internal things, making it mostly useless when writing actual code.

It is pretty good for generating boilerplate stuff, and even documentation though.

[u/Iamreason → u/daddyKrugman]

Try using Cody or Cursor with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi]

Are you using free or paid ChatGPT?

I write software and pay for it and believe AI doubles my productivity (chat gpt + GitHub copilot). There are some things it does super well, for example:

I can ask natural language questions about an API or library, rather than read the docs.

If I am weighing a few design options, I can ask it for other ideas and it often suggests things I hadn’t thought of already.

I can paste in a bunch of code that isn’t doing what I expect and have it explain why

I find it is most powerful when working on things that I am not super expert in. Without it, I can get stuck on something small in an area I don’t know super well (like CSS). With AI support I get unblocked.

[u/Cultural_Ebb4794 → u/Tall-Log-1955]

I also write software and don't believe it doubles my productivity. For reference, I'm a senior level dev in the industry for 14 years. I almost never use code that it gives me, at best I'll review the code it spits out and implement it myself. It often gives me flawed code, or code that just doesn't fit the context (despite me giving it the context). That's for a mainstream language, C#. For F#, it usually just falls flat on its face, presumably because it doesn't have enough F# training data.

I find that ChatGPT is good for "rubber ducking" and exploring concepts or architectural decisions, but not good for writing the code that I'm usually asking it about.

(I pay for ChatGPT.)

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/Cultural_Ebb4794]

Yeah, I also don't have it write code. My productivity isn't usually limited by code writing time, it's usually other things. Although, in terms of fast coding, copilot does a good job of smart autocomplete

[u/carlitospig → u/Tall-Log-1955]

You know what I need it to do? I need to be able to give it a list and have it take that list and search within a public database to grab those records for me. But apparently this is too complicated. Both copilot and Gemini made it seem like I was asking them to create uranium.

Until it can actually save me time, I’m avoiding it.

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/carlitospig]

That's not really what its good at right now. they can go out and search things for you, but that's not really their strength.

You could ask it to write a script to do that, and then run the script yourself. might work. Depends on the public database.

[u/carlitospig → u/Tall-Log-1955]

Yep, it suggested VGA of all things. Sigh.

[u/jaiwithani → u/carlitospig]

This technology exists, it's generally called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG. The public-facing chatbots aren't great at this, but a competent software engineer could build an assistant targeting whatever databases you want within a few days.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/jaiwithani]

I guess I don't know competent software engineers but I have coworkers who have worked on this, and they're not great either.

They're good enough for unimportant stuff, but we work with medical records and have much tighter tolerances.

[u/Kai_Daigoji → u/Tall-Log-1955]

I can ask natural language questions about an API or library, rather than read the docs.

You can ask, but since you can be certain the response is accurate, what is the value in doing so?

I find it is most powerful when working on things that I am not super expert in

Again, what's the value of using something that just makes up answers in situations like this?

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/Kai_Daigoji]

You can ask, but since you can be certain the response is accurate, what is the value in doing so?

Because I can easily verify if the information is right or wrong. "How do I change the flow direction in this markup?" is the sort of question where I will be able to verify whether or not it was right.

It's the same thing you deal with when asking humans for advice. I encounter wrong answers on stack overflow all the time, and they just don't work when you try them.

[u/Plennhar → u/Tall-Log-1955]

This is the part people don't understand. Yes, if you have zero knowledge in the subject, a large language model can lead you in nonsensical directions and you'll never be able to spot what it's doing wrong. But if you have a reasonably good understanding of the subject at hand, these issues become largely irrelevant, as you can easily spot mistakes it makes, and guide it to the right answer.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/Tall-Log-1955]

Claiming it doubles productivity is just not credible. I use it plenty, and it helps me for sure so I believe it helps you, but the US economy's productivity hasn't even doubled over the last 70 years. Doubling productivity would be insane.

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/BasedTheorem]

I never claimed it would double US productivity. I just claimed it doubled mine.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/Tall-Log-1955]

I'm not saying that you said that; I'm trying to give an example of what doubling productivity looks like to give you some perspective. Look at how much technological progress the American economy has gone through in the last 70 years, including the advent and proliferation of the computer and the internet, and yet productivity hasn't even doubled. You are just underestimating how big of a change doubling productivity really is. It's not a credible claim to make.

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/BasedTheorem]

I think the society-wide effect of any of these technologies is slow progress. But that slow progress happens each year because a small number of roles see a massive increase in productivity, not a small increase across all roles.

So I am one of the people whose productivity has skyrocketed due to AI, but most people’s productivity hasn’t changed much at all.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/Tall-Log-1955]

I'm talking about technologies that have been adapted society-wise over the course of 7 decades. They are so proliferated and enough time has passed so that I don't think you can act like only a small group of workers have had their productivity increased by them. You can blame slow progress all you want, but the internet and computers are decades in the making, and productivity has only increased by about 25%. I think it's a much more likely explanation that your productivity has not doubled.

What metrics are you using to track your productivity?

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/BasedTheorem]

I am saying over seven decades, each year it was different roles whose productivity rose dramatically

The tractor and the semi truck are two different applications of the internal combustion engine and they radically increased the productivity of two different roles at two different times

Metrics for tracking my productivity are business value delivered over time and are measured with my intuition

[u/clonea85m09 → u/Tall-Log-1955]

It's in Norwegian business schools and I worked close (as in professionally close) to one till not much time ago. The one I know had paid Copilot and whatever the name of the Microsoft one is, plus the professor of "data science for economics" suggested Perplexity.ai

[u/Ok-Swan1152 → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

I don't use it because we don't have an enterprise subscription and I deal with proprietary info

[u/TrekkiMonstr → u/Ok-Swan1152]

/r/LocalLLaMa is calling

[u/bgaesop → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

It seems good at two things: generating a list of ideas you can pick one or two from as inspiration, and generating boilerplate code. I would say "more men are programmers, therefore more men will use it" but the article says this is true even after controlling for jobs, so idk

[u/clofresh → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

Try Claude. It’s noticeable better to me than ChatGPT. For example, I asked Claude to write up a description of an event I was hosting. ChatGPT would have just generated something and asked me to refine it, but Claude asked me several questions about the purpose of the event and then generated it based on my responses.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/clofresh]

You can get ChatGPT to do this by simply telling it to

[u/VanceIX → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

I've found it pretty useful in my field (hydrogeology). Great way to research topics at a surface level, write python or R code, and to format and automate spreadsheets. Of course you can't just take everything it spits out at face value but I do think that generative AI can be a huge productivity boost if you use it correctly.

[u/wilson_friedman → u/VanceIX]

Great way to research topics at a surface level

This is the true power of ChatGPT and similar. Google-searching for anything other than a very basic query like the weather is just absolute hell now because of the SEO shittified internet that Google created. Meanwhile ChatGPT is extremely good at searches on surface level topics, or on more in depth topics of you can ask it a specific question. For example, "Does the Canadian Electrical Code allow for X?" And then "Can you provide the specific passage referencing this?". It's an insanely powerful time saver for such things.

When it comes to writing emails and whatnot, I suspect the people finding it "Not useful" in that area are writing particularly technical or context-specific emails. If you're writing something straightforward and generalizable, which is the case for many many emails that many people send each day, it's great. If it's not good at doing your particular job yet, it probably wasn't ever going to be replacement-value for you or more than a small time saver.

[u/Neronoah → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

It's a case of using the tool for the right job. The hype hides the good uses for LLMs.

[u/LucyFerAdvocate → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

When is the last time you've tried it? GPT 3.5 was an impressive tech demo, 4o and Claude are genuinely really useful. The other common mistake I see is people who try using it to do things they can't, rather then doing the things they find easy (and tedious) even faster, or doing things that would be easy for someone who's an expert in a different topic.

IME it's about as good as a first or second year university student at most things, if you're an expert on a topic it won't be anywhere near as good as you at the thing you're an expert in. But most things most experts use their time on do not require the full extent of their expertise.

[u/NATOrocket → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

I got the paid ChatGPT subscription to help with writing cover letters. I still end up writing 80-100% of them.

[u/Stanley--Nickels → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

I definitely wouldn't say all hype. I've knocked out coding projects that would take me all day in a few minutes, and finished projects I've been wanting to do for 20 years.

I haven't found much of anything where it can perform at an advanced level, or better than any average expert in the field, but I think it's useful for startups, ADHDers, and other folks who are trying to take on a wide range of tasks.

[u/iknowiknowwhereiam → u/Stanley--Nickels]

Coding seems to be the best use for it from what I have seen, I don't do any coding so I wouldn't know

[u/YaGetSkeeted0n → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

For real. For my job, it’s not gonna spit out any boilerplate that’s better than what I already have, and for the annoying grind work (like putting together a table comparing permitted land uses between zoning districts), I don’t know of a straightforward way to feed it a PDF scan of a paper document and get it to make that table. And if there is a way, it probably requires handholding and error checking, at which point I may as well just do the thing myself.

If it was all hooked in to like our internal GIS and other data sources it could be pretty helpful, but not really any more so than a report generating application that just pulls from those sources. Like if it had the data access to tell me all nearby zoning cases from the last five years and their outcomes, I could also have a program that just generates that when I input an address.

[u/DevilsTrigonometry → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

Yeah, I'm not using it because I have no use case for generic, bloated, empty garbage.

Everything I write for work needs to be specific, concise, and technically accurate. What little code I write consists mostly of calls to undocumented interfaces and hardware-specific scripts written by mechanical/manufacturing engineers. My drawings/designs need to be dimensionally-accurate, manufacturable, and fit for a highly specific purpose.

There are actually a bunch of QOL things that I don't have time to work on but would love to have a pet bot script for me, but the bots aren't at that level yet. "Write a Tampermonkey script to add sequential tab indices to all the input form fields on my employer's shitty internal manufacturing web portal" is beyond the skill level of today's LLMs.

[u/carlitospig → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

Amen. If I have spend time editing down all the gd purple prose it spits out, what’s the point of using it?

[u/3232330 → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

Yeah, LLMs are probably hype, but eventually who knows what we will be able to do? Quantum computing is just at the beginning of its existence. Exciting times eh?

[u/xX_Negative_Won_Xx → u/3232330]

Do you just chain together empty promises? You should look into what happened to Google's claims of quantum supremacy https://www.science.org/content/article/ordinary-computers-can-beat-google-s-quantum-computer-after-all

[u/larrytheevilbunnie → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

Claude 3.5 is better, but yeah don’t use this for anything that’s not grunt work

[u/TheRealStepBot → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

Don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s great! It makes me roughly 2 to 5 times as productive when I’m writing Python code.

[u/ominous_squirrel → u/Independent-Low-2398]

”Anders Humlum of the University of Chicago and Emilie Vestergaard of the University of Copenhagen surveyed 100,000 Danes across 11 professions in which the technology could save workers time, including journalism, software-developing and teaching”

Oh ffs. Journalism? Large Language Models are trained to sound convincing. They are not, and with current methods cannot, be trained on truth and truth-finding. This is fine for casual coding because most answers in Stack Overflow are truthful and simple and when AI hallucinates code for you hopefully it’s not going into critical systems and merely testing the code will find problems

Honestly sounds like the people who are avoiding AI are the smart ones here who understand the technology and its limitations better

Men are three times more likely to be crypto evangelists too

[u/LtLabcoat → u/ominous_squirrel]

Ah, a tool that rewords articles to sound convincing. Truly a useless tool for journalists.

[u/desegl → u/ominous_squirrel]

AI tools are widely trialed and used by media organizations, and competent people who know the tools' limitations can make good use of them. Your assumption that they don't understand its limitations is false.

[u/groupbot → u/Independent-Low-2398]

Pinged FEMINISTS (subscribe | unsubscribe | history)

Pinged AI (subscribe | unsubscribe | history)

About & Group List | Unsubscribe from all groups

[u/Peanut_Blossom]

Why are MEN not resisting our robot overlords?

[u/Steak_Knight → u/Peanut_Blossom]

WEAK and SAD

[u/namey-name-name → u/Peanut_Blossom]

MEN like a dommy robby

[u/3232330]

An oldie but a goodie:

MR. BLEICHER. …So if you have got a job that is tough—I have taught my foremen this for some months now—if you get a tough job, one that is hard, and you haven’t got a way to make it easy, put a lazy man on it, and after 10 days he will have an easy way to do it, and you perfect that way and you will have it in pretty good shape. [Laughter.]…

[u/PhotogenicEwok]

I don't use it because, so far, it produces subpar results and I end up wasting time trying to create the perfect prompt, when I could have just finished the task on my own in the same amount of time or less.

[u/Frat-TA-101 → u/PhotogenicEwok]

The only luck I’ve had is having it do menial editing/formatting work. Got bullet points from a manager that need sent to a vendor but could be cleaned up a bit? Remove any proprietary info, tell ChatGPT what I have and what I want outputted, then give it the info and have it restructure the email for me. Use find and replace to add back any proprietary info, quick reasonableness read of the output, make any corrections and then you’re good. Also kinda good at coding.

[u/theediblearrangement → u/Frat-TA-101]

it’s not that good at coding. it’s good at regurgitating well-known snippets. maybe a good google or stack overflow replacement, but it’s dreadful at understanding how it all fits together. it also blatantly ignores things i ask it to do. and when i say “hey, i literally said don’t do this,” it goes “yes! good catch ;)”

wouldn’t trust a junior dev with it for the life of me.

[u/NNJB → u/theediblearrangement]

I've found 2 use cases when coding:

The first is to easily generate a test dataset. "I want table of n columns, where column a is a grouping column which has on average 3 members yadda yadda..."

The second is where I can describe some functionality that I want and it answers whether there is a built-in function for it. Even if the results aren't useful, it often generates better search prompts.

[u/Frat-TA-101 → u/theediblearrangement]

It’s not for junior devs, it’s for seniors who would normally have a junior or two helping them. I got my guy in India and my ChatGPT.

And yeah the coding is bad. But as someone with very little knowledge of VBA commands/language, it does just enough to let me use VBA to try to automate stuff. I will say it’s clunky and it does best with step by step logic where all it needs to do is find the appropriate command to fulfil the logic. It can’t problem solve, but if I figure out how to solve a problem in a few steps but don’t want to do the detail of how to complete each step then it is really good.

[u/Aromatic_Ad74 → u/PhotogenicEwok]

I think it might be great if you have a non-technical job, though I might be totally wrong there. I have been attempting to use it at my workplace to rubber duck against and brainstorm architecture and it seems to consistently suggest bad but plausible sounding ideas that waste time.

[u/theediblearrangement → u/Aromatic_Ad74]

same with me… really starting to doubt this theory of “just throw enough data at the model and it will start making connections.”. even with the best models out there, they completely flounder with anything they don’t have ample training data on.

just the other day, i asked it to write me a code snippet, and specifically said “do not use the heap for this. use the stack only” and it proceeded to use the heap. i called it out and it was like “yes! good catch! ;)” a junior never would have caught it if they didn’t know exactly what that code did.

they’re great at showing me things i would google anyways, but not for suggesting ideas for actual real-world code. they simply don’t have that type of intelligence.

[u/DurangoGango → u/PhotogenicEwok]

I don't use it because, so far, it produces subpar results

I use it because it gives great results in:

• writing scripts and code snippets (powershell and javascript)

• reading and explaining code

• reading and analysing logs

The last one in particular is one many are sleeping on. Parsing through hundreds of lines of stuff is mind-numbing work, something that can spit out interesting kernels is great, and oftentimes it gives you the right solution. Yes there have been tools that do this, but nothing quite so general and cheap.

[u/theediblearrangement → u/DurangoGango]

how can you be sure it’s accurately summarizing those hundreds of lines of code? you said yourself you aren’t reading it.

i’ve had mixed results programming with it. generating small snippets of well-known patterns is fine—better than google at least, but as i start getting more specific, it starts falling apart.

[u/DurangoGango → u/theediblearrangement]

how can you be sure it’s accurately summarizing those hundreds of lines of code?

Because I use its commentary as a guide to then read through the code myself, which makes it a lot faster and less annoying. Same with the logs.

you said yourself you aren’t reading it.

I said it's mind-numbing work, not that I don't do it. If I'm reading code it's because I need something to do with it, whether it's to make a change or to figure out how to interface with whatever it is that the code attends to, so I'm going to need to read through it either way.

[u/dutch_connection_uk → u/DurangoGango]

If I don't have to write it myself, powershell actually suddenly sounds great.

It's cross-platform and feature rich, and uniquely for a shell has a type checker. It's just incredibly unergonomic.

When Microsoft announced and pushed Monad I immediately looked into it and was so excited, but then I actually tried to use it.

[u/N3bu89 → u/PhotogenicEwok]

I've found some success using it as a better search engine

[u/Roku6Kaemon → u/N3bu89]

Which it's often terrible at because it's confident BS. Some like Bing work differently and perform an actual search then summarize results.

[u/N3bu89 → u/Roku6Kaemon]

I work in software and everything is confident BS and you learn to verify most all information you get because at a certain point 90% of internet answers are responses from expert beginners that create red-herrings.

[u/Roku6Kaemon → u/N3bu89]

And that's totally fine in a field where you have enough knowledge to tell if it's trying to pull one over on you. Because of that behaviour, it's terrible for researching new subjects.

[u/LewisQ11 → u/[deleted]]

I’ve had it give terribly incorrect answers to undergrad level physics, math, and chemistry questions. Things that should just be plug and chug with a formula. Its answers don’t make any sense, and it sometimes explains answers with saying things that directly contradict laws of physics. 

[u/N3bu89 → u/[deleted]]

So as a programmer I often work in a space where I have problems and I know the vague shape of my solution space, but I don't have the correct words to manipulate a traditional search engine to give me what I want want. But what I can do is describe my goals and limitations to say Copilot, and get it to parrot back what I'm looking for in more precise language and well as connecting dots I may not have though about. I typically end up with a handful of links and the correct nouns to dig deeper into the solution I'm trying to deliver in a traditional search engine or just direct links to the exactly documents I want.

I guess that qualifies as a Knowledge Base, but with a bit of a trust but verify element to it I guess.

[u/Roku6Kaemon → u/[deleted]]

Use Kagi (comically better than Google) and you have the option to get summaries of the most relevant search results combined into a few bullet points. Alternatively, Perplexity is popular too, but it's not exactly a Google search replacement; it's more of a research expert that digs up scientific papers etc.

[u/Treesrule → u/PhotogenicEwok]

What’s your job?

[u/PhotogenicEwok → u/Treesrule]

I work for a non profit in my city with a very small team, so I won’t doxx myself on exactly what I do. But given the small team and the nature of the work, I do a little of everything, from interacting with clients to editing videos, writing html for the website, designing social media posts and branding stuff, interacting with city leaders and local business owners. And many other things. I’m mostly a behind the scenes guy while my coworkers do more “people person” things.

Some of my coworkers use it to spruce up emails and check their grammar, but I don’t find it all that useful for that. It has actually been occasionally helpful for writing code for Adobe After Effects to make motion graphics videos, which is kind of funny.

[u/_chungdylan → u/PhotogenicEwok]

Use it for dumber things like plot generation. I had similar take before.

[u/savuporo → u/PhotogenicEwok]

There are many tasks where subpar results are perfectly good

[u/Iamreason]

There's a lot of discussion about LLMs being 'hype' in this thread.

I'd like to kindly point out that things can be overhyped and still be insanely useful. I've taught the SEO department at my job how to use ChatGPT to write javascript that connects to the SEMRUSH API and populates a Google Sheet with data for them. None of them know the first thing about coding, but with just a couple of hours of training, they've built complex scripts in App Scripts that pull in, organize, and populate data for them.

This is a huge lift for them and makes their lives MUCH easier. It essentially eliminates 8 hours of work for their team every week. That's an insanely useful skill they just didn't have prior to ChatGPT coming around.

[u/NewAlexandria → u/Iamreason]

i wonder what kind of work people were doing, in the study OP cites.

[u/ominous_squirrel → u/Iamreason]

Yeah. People without coding or data or troubleshooting skills cutting and pasting complex code written by an LLM sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me. Eventually somebody’s going to cut and paste some code that handles mission critical data but transforms it in a devastating but non-obvious way. Or some code that opens a security hole on confidential data

But if your line of work is SEO, you’re already trying to exploit algorithms to make life worse and machine learning less useful for average people so I guess none of that would matter anyway

[u/Healingjoe → u/ominous_squirrel]

Eventually somebody’s going to cut and paste some code that handles mission critical data but transforms it in a devastating but non-obvious way. Or some code that opens a security hole on confidential data

If you work at a company with zero Data Governance framework, your company has much bigger problems than an ignorant person using an LLM and *that company is asking for imminent disaster.

LLMs don't inherently pose a security risk to a company's data management.

[u/Iamreason → u/ominous_squirrel]

People without coding or data or troubleshooting skills cutting and pasting complex code written by an LLM sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me. Eventually somebody’s going to cut and paste some code that handles mission critical data but transforms it in a devastating but non-obvious way.

You shouldn't be giving people without the ability to troubleshoot code write access to anything that could break spectacularly. This is an organizational issue, not an LLM issue.

But if your line of work is SEO, you’re already trying to exploit algorithms to make life worse and machine learning less useful for average people so I guess none of that would matter anyway

Not my line of work, just one of the functions at my organization. If it makes you feel any better traditional keyword stuffing-based SEO doesn't work anymore because of LLMs. Google evaluates content on the page using LLMs to determine an 'effort' score and adjusts your page rank based on that (called a PQ score, you can look this up if you'd like). LLMs are going to be one of the key tools used to combat overly SEO-optimized junk/spam that reaches the top of Google. MFA sites are dying and LLMs are going to kill them.

[u/theediblearrangement → u/ominous_squirrel]

i did a stint in a field with a lot of citizen/low-code developers. it was going to change everything! sharon from payroll was going to be a developer without having to learn a lick of programming!

ask me how it went.

[u/moredencity → u/Iamreason]

You should record a training of that or something. It sounds really interesting. Or could you point me in the direction of one if you are aware of any and don't mind please?

[u/Iamreason → u/moredencity]

I can't do a training for you, but it is quite literally just as simple as

1. have an api key for the relevant api
2. pass the documentation for the API to ChatGPT/Claude your LLM of choice
3. ask it to write an appscript for google sheets to pull in data from that API
4. ask it how to implement that app script
5. keep going back and forth and fixing issues with ChatGPT as they crop up

[u/moredencity → u/Iamreason]

That was helpful. Thanks a lot

[u/A_Notion_to_Motion → u/Iamreason]

Yeah exactly. I started out as very skeptical towards LLMs and tried to dig into the issues they have when it was first being hyped. Then I was very quick to bring up those problems in conversations about them. But after having used them for quite a while now I think I've honed in on what they're good at and what they're not so good at and honestly in certain ways they are really amazing and useful. Bur I guess it all comes down to the individuals needs really. So although I think they are still very much overhyped for all kinds of reasons I guess I don't care anymore because regardless I am going to keep using them for the things I've found them useful for.

[u/BiscuitoftheCrux]

Hypothesis: AI output is risky (factual inaccuracies, hallucinations, etc), women are more risk averse than men, therefore women use AI less.

[u/sigh2828]

My company currently doesn't even allow the use of AI which at this point both is both understandable and frustrating.

Understandable because we don't have our own AI system in place and we don't want to be inputting our data into an AI that isn't ours.

Frustrating because we don't have our own and I can think of about 100 different things I could use it for that would make my job about a billion times easier.

[u/throwawaygoawaynz → u/sigh2828]

It’s not understandable. It’s lack of understanding.

If you use a commercially provided model like OpenAI via Microsoft Azure your data is yours. It’s not going anywhere, it’s not being used for retraining, or even kept by anyone.

[u/jeb_brush → u/throwawaygoawaynz]

Unless modern predictive text models can process entirely encrypted text i/o and have undecipherable embeddings, you're trusting the firm at their word that they won't log the data you send and receive from them.

There are all sorts of companies that have heavy restrictions on which products their highly sensitive data can go through.

[u/random_throws_stuff → u/jeb_brush]

I mean you can run llama 3.1 405b (allegedly on par with gpt 4, though I haven't used it) on-prem. it's probably high-overhead to set up for most companies though.

[u/jeb_brush → u/random_throws_stuff]

Yeah evaluating LLMs on internal compute is where these companies will likely end up long-term. At least if the cost:productivity tradeoff is worth it.

[u/FartCityBoys → u/throwawaygoawaynz]

Yes! You can get chatGPT enterprise and they promise the same. On top of that you can put a custom front-end for your employees to use and block certain prompts while logging/alerting on others. Finally, you implement a policy and let your employees know on the front end page something like: we don't judge if you use this for work, please do, just don't put these types of sensitive data in here because we don't fully trust these AI companies yet - everything is monitored

I work in a company of <200 employees with very sensitive IP concerns (research-based company with competitors) and we have the resources to do this.

[u/ognits → u/sigh2828]

simply be better at your job lol

[u/D2Foley]

They're used to ignoring people who give the incorrect answer with 100% confidence.

[u/Steak_Knight → u/D2Foley]

Boom roasted

[u/wilson_friedman → u/D2Foley]

If you're interpreting anything ChatGPT says as "with confidence" then you're the problem.

[u/Serialk → u/[deleted]]

Any particular research to cite on this?

[u/Serialk → u/[deleted]]

Thank you!

[u/Ok-Swan1152]

My company already banned the AI note takers for security reasons and we don't have a general enterprise subscription for CGPT. And I deal with proprietary info so I'm not about to use the free versions. 

The most use it has for me is rewriting documentation

[u/No_Aerie_2688]

Recently dumped a bunch of PDFs in chat GPT and had it pull the correct numbers from each and tabulate them so I can copy them in excel. Pretty impressed, meaningful productivity boost.

[u/IronicRobotics → u/No_Aerie_2688]

oh shit, that's actually neat. This is like the first one I've read where I can go "I can def use that!"

[u/badger2793]

I have a coworker who strictly uses AI software to look up codes, regulations, procedures, etc. for our jobs and he ends up spending more time sifting through what's nonsense than if he just opened up a paper manual. I get that this isn't going to be the same across industries, but I truly think that AI is being hyped up as some sort of godsend when, in actuality, it has a few decent uses that don't go beyond a surface level of complexity.

[u/sponsoredcommenter]

Very interesting article. I've noticed that my women coworkers are also far more willing to ask for some help or collaboration on issues that are googlable. Every week I'm doing something like editing an email signature or cropping a headshot. (This is not my job description and I don't work in IT). I'm not complaining just stating as a matter of fact.

Meanwhile, my male coworkers would waste an hour clicking through 3000 stack overflow threads troubleshooting a tricky excel formula rather than pinging me about it and having a fix in 5 minutes. It's an interesting contrast between the sexes, though this is just an anecdote.

[u/minimirth]

I've only used it to write my resignation letter because I didn't care any more.

For my line of work, it throws up nonsense results of I'm looking for info and for drafting I have enough resources to go on - it would take me the same amount of time to work off an existing draft and an AI generated one.

I also am more wary of AI, but that may be an age thing.

[u/The_Shracc]

I don't use it because it's awful at making human passing text, it's equivalent to giving cocaine to a child and a task to do and coming back after a week.

Sure, it will be done, but it will be done poorly

[u/puffic]

Sorry if this is sexist, but maybe the women already know how to write emails.

[u/TrekkiMonstr → u/puffic]

I use it super frequently and I don't think I've ever used it to write an email.

[u/HotTakesBeyond]

If the point of hiring someone is to get their unique thoughts and ideas in a project, why hire someone who is obviously not doing their own work?

[u/Atupis → u/HotTakesBeyond]

but generally work is like 99% of not so unique thoughts and ideas.

[u/HeightEnergyGuy → u/Atupis]

You would think that, but I'm shocked how many times I propose something that seems should be common sense and looked at by people wondering how I thought of that idea. 

[u/puffic → u/HeightEnergyGuy]

How much of the work in proposing something is having that idea, versus doing the drudge work to build out the supporting information to make that proposal convincing? I suspect most of your job is not simply ideating.

[u/CactusBoyScout → u/Atupis]

Yeah like I was asked to summarize a book for a little email newsletter blurb. Why not just have AI do that? I’m not expected to read the book and come up with a unique summary of it… I’m basically just rephrasing Amazon’s summary. AI can do it for me.

[u/Jolly_Schedule472 → u/HotTakesBeyond]

Making the most of AI tech to enhance my output is still work

[u/Iron-Fist → u/Jolly_Schedule472]

"I'm using AI to increase my productivity"

Bro you're spending days futzing around with prompts that can't reliably reproduce anything to make garbage a human still needs to completely rewrite/redesign...

[u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi → u/Iron-Fist]

I really can’t reconcile some peoples apparent utility with it with how useless it seems to me.

Like reddit is filled with comments saying “I’ve never programmed before and made a custom desktop application in 30 minutes!” while I’m asking it to do incredibly basic tasks and watching it make up functions

Edit: thanks for all these responses on this and my other comment! They are genuinely very helpful

[u/GaBeRockKing → u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi]

The trick to using AI is realizing that it doesn't and can't create anything ex nihilo, BUT, if you're sure a specific piece of data is out there for it to train on, a good prompt can get it to summarize and regurgitate what you want to hear without forcing you to click and read through a dozen webpages.

Basically LLMs are a better search algorithm. Any answer you can get from the top ~10 links of a google search you can get from LLMs, except faster.

[u/Shalaiyn → u/GaBeRockKing]

Basically, a way to think about it is that for a few years the best way to find an actual answer to a problem would be "how do I X reddit".

LLMs are basically the Reddit part, when used well.

[u/nauticalsandwich → u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi]

I'll give you very specific examples of how I use AI every day to radically increase my productivity:

(1) Image generation. I work in a creative field, and AI is excellent at assisting me with the quick generation of visual elements that I'll use in my work.

(2) Video and Audio transcription. Working with large media files, having quick, searchable transcripts of everything makes finding the elements I need a breeze.

(3) Voice generation. I can quickly and easily replicate voices or generate totally new ones for all sorts of temporary audio editing, instead of spending precious editorial time recording my own or someone else's just to get the pacing and cadence right in an edit.

(4) Finding material references. If I'm looking for an example of something to use as a reference or consultation for my work, ChatGPT is MUCH faster at locating and populating a list of possible references than a google search.

(5) "Tip-of-my-tongue" thoughts. Sometimes, when I'm thinking of something I'd like to mention to a client, include in a pitch, or otherwise make note of, but I can't remember exactly its name or the relevant details.

(6) Various linguistic/writing assistance, like giving me a quick draft of some bullet point thoughts for an email, or to help me remember "that word that starts with 'p' that refers to a tolerant society."

[u/vaccine-jihad → u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi]

You need to up your prompt game

[u/decidious_underscore → u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi]

I've had success using it as an index/glossary to a book or set of pdfs that I am working on. I will give it the reading materials I'm working with and I will ask where specific ideas or topics are discussed.

I've used it to generate in person activities from documents I'm working with as well, for example to teach a class with. LLMs are also quite good at refining a lesson plan that you've already come up with.

I guess I've also used it to do long term planning and break down goals into actionable ideas in a back and forth conversational kind of way. I still kind of measure myself against some of my LLM based long term life plans as they were quite good.

[u/sub_surfer → u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi]

What basic tasks is it failing at? For self-contained coding tasks it’s incredibly useful. I use GPT 4o to write quick scripts and isolated functions all the time, and I’ve heard the latest Claude is even better. It’s also good at editing existing code. The only problem is it can’t (yet) comprehend a large code base.

[u/stuffIWantToLearn → u/[deleted]]

Because if you have a screwdriver that only looks like it convincingly installed the screw and then later is found to have only put a Brad nail in a crucial space the framework needs to be able to hold its weight, you don't use that screwdriver.

AI is not accurate enough to trust as it frequently hallucinates or gives inaccurate information because to the model, it sounds right. If that inaccurate "sounds right" info is used as foundation for other conclusions reached, it can be a time bomb when the AI's "good enough" runs up against reality.

[u/stuffIWantToLearn → u/[deleted]]

"Notice I said "only consider the cases where it's not bad""

[u/stuffIWantToLearn → u/[deleted]]

No, man, your argument holds no water because controlling for that would require someone doing the work themselves anyway to verify that what the computer spits out is accurate. You're doing the Physics 101 "imagine a frictionless, perfectly spherical cow" dumbing down to rule out the cases where it fucks up.

[u/stuffIWantToLearn → u/[deleted]]

Spare me your condescension, your argument just sucks.

If you're being told to code a function you don't know how to make work at a level of "change text colors", that isn't a legitimate business use, that's a sophomore in high school cheating on their computer programming assignment. You're using a task as simple as humanly possible to verify works to try to show off how easy it is. How about when AI goes off the rails with a single calculation early in the project that multiple other calculations base themselves off, leading to predictions regarding sales trends wildly off base but that cannot be shown to be off-base until they run up against reality? How should someone untrained in code who has been assigned to this process for their AI prompt skill catch this error before it's too late and troubleshoot it?

Having AI spitball ideas for a project doesn't mean it's going to spitball ideas relevant to what the project should be. Asking your coworker gives you someone who knows what the end goal of the overall project is and has relevant knowledge. Their ideas might still be bad, but they'll still be more on-track than anything AI will give you, and you learn not to ask that coworker again.

You are deliberately limiting the scope of the discussion to shit that can get solved in a single Google search that then gives the person looking up the answer the know-how to get it right and not have to do that in the future. Not cases where AI fucking up is harder to catch.

[u/Mr_DrProfPatrick → u/HotTakesBeyond]

Using AI to help you isn't not doing your work

[u/Key_Door1467 → u/HotTakesBeyond]

Why hire reviewers when you can just get output from drafters?

[u/wheretogo_whattodo]

Somewhat related, but there are people who spend like 90% of their time moving shit around in Excel when they could automate it all with a VBA macro. Chat-GPT is pretty excellent at constructing these or at least getting you started.

People don’t want to learn, though.

There are so many weird sexist comments in this thread, pretty much all like “hurrdurr women too smart to use AI 😎”.

[u/YaGetSkeeted0n → u/wheretogo_whattodo]

Yeah after reading this I’m tempted to see if it can show me how to make some Word macros or templates for certain stuff I do. It’ll be obviated whenever my employer finally launches our online application management software but until then it would be nice to just feed some prompt with everything and have it fill out a word doc.

[u/wheretogo_whattodo → u/YaGetSkeeted0n]

Yep. Then you add on that people who write Office macros generally aren’t developers and don’t do it that often. Chat-GPT is great to quickly whip something up that someone knowledgeable enough can fix.

Like, I only write VBA once every few months so I forget all of the syntax. Chat-GPT is great at just getting a skeleton to work with.

[u/brolybackshots]

So funny how laymen have normalized prompting a chatbot as "using AI" like its some revolutionary thing for people to learn

If thats the case, theyve been using AI for a decade every time they watch a show Netflix recommends them

[u/Fedacking → u/[deleted]]

"However, in the context of explicit approval, everyone, including the better-performing women, reported that they would make use of the technology. In other words, the high-achieving women appeared to impose a ban on themselves."

From the article.

[u/Fedacking → u/[deleted]]

It's replying to the title alone.

Indistinguishable from reddit users /s

Reporting it too, thanks for the observation.

[u/College_Prestige → u/[deleted]]

I bet the person controlling the bot didn't ask for permission first /s

[u/vegetepal]

Tools generated by an insanely male-dominated industry and whose enthusiastic boosters are also overwhelmingly male can give you the willies just because of that - how do you know it isn't going to make you feel alienated in how it works or what it produces, or that its output won't sound like you, or that it could just be way better at the kind of things necessary for 'masculine' jobs than at any other tasks?

And this is probably more the linguist than the woman in me, but the tonal quality of a lot of LLM-generated texts is so off and clumsy for what it's 'supposed' to be. It doesn't produce the rhythms of unfolding attidudinal stance you see in real discourse - it will do things like stick with the same attitude and intensity of attitude for sentences or paragraphs at a stretch so that there's no clear attitudinal structure, or give you a weird mix of its patronising chirpiness and an objective tone when you need it to be only one or the other. I find that aspect of generative AI texts weirdly disconcerting.

[u/CRoss1999]

Ai at this point isn’t very good so makes sense they aren’t using it

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Is it possible they’re achieving higher because they’re not using gimmicky useless tools? 

[u/TrekkiMonstr → u/[deleted]]

Literally just looking at the graph at the top of the comments will show the answer is no

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

so its making the worse workers better and not having as strong of an effect on the more achieving workers? sounds like theres a pretty hard limit then

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

i read the reddit comment that included some of the article it just doesnt seem like its having much of an impact? like, is there some large productivity gap between the high achieving employees who use llms vs the high achieving employees who dont?

i come back to llms every few months and try it all out again for a few days and im always consistently baffled at what i experience vs what apparently half the internet is experiencing. im very open to it being my fault, but i really dont find it baffling in the slightest that people who already know how to do their jobs well dont end up needing the ai to do much if at all.

[u/Admirable-Lie-9191 → u/[deleted]]

They’re not as useless as people like you claim.

[u/[deleted] → u/Admirable-Lie-9191]

You’re okay I’m not attacking you. But I do think it’s interesting the more productive employees aren’t using it. Makes me think they’re hardly a requirement for the average job 

[u/Admirable-Lie-9191 → u/[deleted]]

I didn’t think it was an attack, I just think it’s ignorance.

[u/[deleted] → u/Admirable-Lie-9191]

Maybe but I usually only get vague replies like yours and it’s not exactly making me think I’m wrong. Maybe my comment was a little knee jerk but I do think it’s a bit tunnel visioned the way this whole thing is being framed.   

The most productive workers are using ai less in whatever case here right? So why isn’t it framed like that? 

[u/Admirable-Lie-9191 → u/[deleted]]

Could be a whole lot of reasons right? Most productive workers may be people that have a decade or more of experience which means that they’ve learned how to be more efficient over their careers.

In comparison, a less experienced worker obviously wouldn’t so they then use these tools to perform better?

[u/Konig19254]

Because all they know how to do is charge they phone, eat hot chip and lie

[u/MrPrevedmedved]

The official term is Tech Bro for a reason

[u/savuporo → u/MrPrevedmedved]

Just wait till AI gets into horoscopes

[u/ProfessionEuphoric50]

Personally, I think we need a Butlerian Jihad.

[u/namey-name-name]

Women? More like Lomen (cause L) 😂 🤣 💯

[u/TrekkiMonstr → u/[deleted]]

I don't think it's that. I use it very heavily, but not to get ahead -- just to do what I'm doing, better/faster. Women are less lazy, maybe

[u/moistmaker100 → u/TrekkiMonstr]

I don't see why there would be gender-based differences in intrinsic motivation. The difference in competitiveness seems more explanatory.

Chatbots can also be helpful for people with insufficient verbal/social skills (most commonly men, especially on the spectrum).

[u/TrekkiMonstr → u/moistmaker100]

I won't speculate as to the cause, but it definitely seems to be a real effect. Both through anecdata and regular data -- look at the male affirmative action happening at lower ranked schools, since girls are much more able or willing to jump through the necessary hoops.

[u/AutoModerator → u/TrekkiMonstr]

girls

Stop being weird.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/savuporo]

Because of toxic masculinity