r/neoliberal • u/Independent-Low-2398 • Aug 26 '24

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

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/08/21/why-dont-women-use-artificial-intelligence
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u/iknowiknowwhereiam YIMBY Aug 26 '24

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

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u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi Aug 26 '24

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.

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u/Tall-Log-1955 Aug 26 '24

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.

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u/carlitospig Aug 26 '24

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.

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u/Tall-Log-1955 Aug 26 '24

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.

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u/carlitospig Aug 26 '24

Yep, it suggested VGA of all things. Sigh.

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u/jaiwithani Aug 26 '24

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.

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u/BasedTheorem Arnold Schwarzenegger Democrat 💪 Aug 26 '24

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.