What's my relationship with AI?

Even if you don't want to use AI - you already are - it's everywhere, even just your internet searches. Since I work with tech, I have experimented as it grows and I'm forming some opinions about it.  First up, we shouldn't call it AI. I reckon "chatbot", "LLM", or if I go right back to 1992 when I actually did a university unit in it - we called it "Artificial Neural Networks" back then.  In reading up about LLMs I discovered that it is all still based on the premises I learnt about a long long time ago.

So what are my opinions?

Straight away I cross off life coach/counselling/psychology. It's just a plain 'ole bad idea.  It will just spew generic tyre-pumping tripe at you - it will tell you what you want to hear and help you rationalise bad ideas. Throw that away immediately. As a research tool - yes. I reckon it is a better search engine *at this point in time* than any of the normal search engines.  For starters the traditional search engines have all been SEO'd to death and skewed towards how to make money from you. The chatbots on the otherhand have devoured all the content and will regurgitate whatever you need in a friendly summarised manner easy to digest. It is still fraught with danger and it is only a matter of time before it too is all about making money from you, but we are right now in that happy phase where you can search for information and then continue to drill deeper and get more specific as you go. With the caveat that you can't believe anything is says, so references to actual sources of truth are important for when what you are searching for is important - like stuff about health, finance, legality.

Let's quickly deal with art.  Whilst I find pictures and videos it generates fascinating, I've kinda decided no. Not for anything serious or important. I took a photo of my work colleagues and I at lunch the other day and had the LLMs make it look like a "The Simpsons" style scene.  It was really, really good.  It has no practical value, is built on stolen art, it is essentially useless except as a curio. Last week I put a couple of headshots of myself into a video LLM generator and attempted to render a few scenes of me riding a horse with a guitar strapped to my back - as "Bard JAW" - rock up at a tavern, go into a room full of fantasy style creatures and then play some fingerstyle guitar.  Some of it was okay, but mostly it was a mess.  Once again, no practical value, built on stolen art and just a curio.

Music is the same deal. When people are less "actively listening" and music is just background, if it is LLM produced will anyone care?  Nope. But is that good?  Nope. And when it writes songs with meaningful heartfelt lyrics? The LLMs have no soul and have no place in trying to connect with people on a human level. So the LLMs can leave the music creating space alone...with a side note that using it as a research tool is not the same thing as creating music.

Literature? Hard no. Same as LLMs trying to connect with people on a human level.  With it's generic regurgitation of everything that it has scraped in a pleasant soulless manner devoid of new ideas. Just no.

Okay JAW So where would you use LLMs?  I have used the LLMs to create code that would have otherwise taken me days.  It's really good at creating code.  What's more, when I read through the code techniques it uses I see really clever stuff that I wouldn't have dreamed of doing - because it is based on the work of actual programmers whereas I'm just an engineer hack who taught himself BASIC on a Commodore 64 in the 80's and still approaches coding problems in that same way.  HOWEVER LLMs are just for little tools.  Even when you end up with a 500 line python script you can already see the cracks forming - it doesn't have a neat core with modular functionality written around it, it tends to a monolith that if you want just a little change the whole thing needs to be rewritten.  And it is not good at rewriting big chunks of code for little changes - suddenly it will drop functionality and you will fight it to put it back. I wouldn't trust AI to write anything big and important.

I have been using it for vocal isolation - taking a recording of a church congregation singing and getting it to remove the drums/bass/instruments just leaving behind the singing.  In fact just yesterday I used a chatbot to research the current state of vocal isolation, describing my use case, that I just wanted a command line interface with a model and it came up with a bunch of things to try.  I used a 10 second WAV snippet and ran it through several of the surprisingly many models that people have created, gave it feedback on how I thought it went, and it recommended other things to try.  In about two hours I had significantly improved my vocal isolation result - not just the model that gave me the best results for my use case, but it improved my approach to feeding that model.

I could go on more about this giant very topical subject but I've hit the key detail right there. What's my relationship with AI? I use it where I can test its output.  Not where I need to trust it - but where it has given me something that I can verify and is useful to me.  As a timesaver.  Yes, this *will* make me dumber, because in pre-LLM days I would have to do the research - all the grunt work - and it is that process where you learn a lot. And anything that is about human connection - no LLM, back off, stay in your lane, that is not your space.

No LLMs were used to generate this post.