urban75 forums
So I changed jobs about 9 months ago, from editorial/content to bid writing, which is quite technical and specific sort of content production, and I've come in new to the role just as they are piloted a specialist AI that is sort of 'ringfenced' so our material that is confidential doesn't go into the AI wild.
It's been an interesting experience, and (while you know I am not uncritical of AI from my other posts on this forum) it definitely has its use cases here. The writing involves digging up existing case studies and material and it can be useful for that because it gives your sources and even if you think it's not quite right you can look up the source and find something useful, or confirm it's not relevant in this case. Given we otherwise have to dig things up from very busy subject matters experts who are also doing operational shit every day, that's useful.
You can also use it to crititique responses based on criteria, which is quite nifty but I am still working on how to do this effectively. The no.1 thing I've been finding good is the word cutting because we have to work to strict limits, it's generally very good at it and saves a lot of tedious work - I DIY if it's a few dozen words, but if you've got 100+ out for 2000 to cut it does a great job by and large. Absolutely needs checking, I sometimes remove stuff that sounds too AI, and twice in these last 9 months I have spotted it plain make up a word (think something like 'imaginated'; that wasn't it, but that's the sort of thing - it was close, but just hallucinated a fake word), but where it needs more than the odd word pruning, the AI is good at rearranging sentences to a more concise form that I am bad at doing and find tedious. So takes potentially a few hours' work to more like 15 minutes where you have to trim off a lot.
It's a good example of somewhere where it won't take jobs and will always need a human to work alongside it, but it does help with the donkeywork. Interestingly, though, we have some writers from an agency on this and the agency does not permit their writers to use it at all.
I've signed up to an 'AI apprenticeship' through work which is going to take a bit of time and application but I think might be a genuinely useful thing to undertake to really fit my skills in with it and get to understand it a bit better.
So I definitely see applications for it, though obviously there is a lot of harmful bullshit as well as the environmental cost which is extremely concerning.
It's been an interesting experience, and (while you know I am not uncritical of AI from my other posts on this forum) it definitely has its use cases here. The writing involves digging up existing case studies and material and it can be useful for that because it gives your sources and even if you think it's not quite right you can look up the source and find something useful, or confirm it's not relevant in this case. Given we otherwise have to dig things up from very busy subject matters experts who are also doing operational shit every day, that's useful.
You can also use it to crititique responses based on criteria, which is quite nifty but I am still working on how to do this effectively. The no.1 thing I've been finding good is the word cutting because we have to work to strict limits, it's generally very good at it and saves a lot of tedious work - I DIY if it's a few dozen words, but if you've got 100+ out for 2000 to cut it does a great job by and large. Absolutely needs checking, I sometimes remove stuff that sounds too AI, and twice in these last 9 months I have spotted it plain make up a word (think something like 'imaginated'; that wasn't it, but that's the sort of thing - it was close, but just hallucinated a fake word), but where it needs more than the odd word pruning, the AI is good at rearranging sentences to a more concise form that I am bad at doing and find tedious. So takes potentially a few hours' work to more like 15 minutes where you have to trim off a lot.
It's a good example of somewhere where it won't take jobs and will always need a human to work alongside it, but it does help with the donkeywork. Interestingly, though, we have some writers from an agency on this and the agency does not permit their writers to use it at all.
I've signed up to an 'AI apprenticeship' through work which is going to take a bit of time and application but I think might be a genuinely useful thing to undertake to really fit my skills in with it and get to understand it a bit better.
So I definitely see applications for it, though obviously there is a lot of harmful bullshit as well as the environmental cost which is extremely concerning.