But please accept that you are in a small subset of people that it is very useful to. Every time I hear someone championing AI, it is a coder. AI is basically useless to me, it is just a convoluted expensive google search.
It's still useful to a small subset of all those professions - the early adopters. Same way computers were useful to many professionals before the UI (but only a small fraction of them had the skillset to use terminals)
How so? How are you using LLMs to practice law? Genuinely curious.
There's even reported cases of entire legislations being written with LLMs already [1]. I'm sure there's thousands more we haven't heard about - the same way researchers are writing papers w/ LLMs w/o disclosing it
[1] https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/12/05/pro/lei-escrita-pelo-...
Like, this is malpractice, surely?
Some people expect AI to never make mistakes when doing jobs where people routinely make all kinds of mistakes of varying severity.
It’s the same as how people expect self-driving cars to be flawless when they think nothing of a pileup caused by a human watching a reel while behind the wheel.
So, the mechanic who maintenanced it last?
...
We don't fault our tools, legally. We usually also don't fault the manufacturer, or the maintenance guy. We fault the people using them.
If you’re not using ai in your practice, you’re doing a disservice to your clients.
I use a custom prompt to adjust the tone, but that’s about it.
imo while many here on HN debate the future of SWEs in the era of LLMs, there is no debate about future of many legal jobs - they will disappear
The argument I make is why aren’t more people finding ways to code with AI?
I work in a leadership role at a marketing agency and am a passable coder for scripts using Python and/or Google Apps Scripts. In the past year, I’ve built more useful and valuable tools with the help of AI than I had in the 3 or so years before.
We’re automating more boring stuff than ever before. It boggles my mind that everybody isn’t doing this.
In the past, I was limited by technical ability because my knowledge of our business and processes was very high. Now I’m finding that technical ability isn’t my limitation, it’s how well I can explain our processes to AI.
Interesting, I'm the opposite now. Why would I click a couple links to read a couple (verbose) blog posts when I can read a succinct LLM response. If I have low confidence in the quality of the response then I supplement with Google search.
I feel near certain that I am saving time with this method. And the output is much more tuned to the context and framing of my question.
Hah, take for example my last query in ChatGPT:
> Are there any ancient technologies that when discovered furthered modern understanding of its field?
ChatGPT gave some great responses, super fast. Google also provides some great results (though some miss the mark), but I would need to parse at least three different articles and condense the results.
To be fair, ChatGPT gives some bad responses too.. But both an LLM and Google search should be used in conjunction to perform a search at the same time.
Use LLMs as breadth-first search, and Google as depth-first search.
There was a different thread on this site i read where a journalist used the wrong units of measurement (kilowatts instead of killowatt-hours for energy storage). You could paste the entire article into chatGPT with a prompt "spot mistakes in the following; [text]" and get an appropriate correction for this and similar mistakes the author made.
As in there's journalists right now posting articles with clear mistakes that could have been proof read more accurately than they were if they were willing to use AI. The only excuse i could think of is resistance to change. A lot of professions right now could do their job better if they leant on the current generation of AI.
I could have google it myself in the evenings and had the answer in a few days of research, but with o1 in a 15min session my wife had had a solid weekly routine, the reasoning about those choices and academic papers with research about those products. (Obviously she knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation).
Nothing game changer, but is great to save lots of time in this kind of tasks.
If you're relying on AI to replace a human doctor trained in skin care or alternatively, your Google skills; please consider consulting an actual doctor.
If she "knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation", then what did AI actually accomplish in the end.
No worries, I can tell you what to expect: nothing. No effect. Zilch. Nada. Zero. Those beauty creams are just a total scam and that's obvious from the fact they're targetted just as well to women who don't need them (young, good skin) as to ones who do (older, bad skin).
About the only thing the beauty industry has figured out really works in the last five or six decades is Tretinoin, but you can use that on its own. Yet it's sold as one component in creams with a dozen others, that do nothing. Except make you spend money.
_____________
[1] Topical tretinoin for treating photoaging: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials (2022)
From Wikipedia[2]: "Isotretinoin is a teratogen; there is about a 20–35% risk for congenital defects in infants exposed to the drug in utero, and about 30–60% of children exposed to isotretinoin prenatally have been reported to show neurocognitive impairment".
See also pages like r/AccutaneRecovery[3] for people harmed by using it for acne, reporting systemic damage, perhaps permanent damage.
Scroll down[1] for the picture of some of the possible side effects of oral Accutane/Isotretinoin on the mother[3] and note that Wikipedia says "the most common adverse effects are dry lips (cheilitis), dry and fragile skin (xeroderma), dry eyes[8] and an increased susceptibility to sunburn" and wonder how a beauty treatment which improves skin condition has most common side effects which ruin skin condition.
This line of inquiry leads to a fun conspiracy/woo hypothesis; Grant Genereux[5]'s claims that what it does is trigger stem cells to differentiate in the epithelial layers of the skin, which makes thicker skin in the short term (wrinkle free) and worn out stem cells and thick skin in the longer term - and that many small vessels in the body have an epithelial lining of 'internal skin' and that thickens by the same mechanism leading to narrowing and closing of all kinds of internal vessels - tear ducts and sweat glands and blood vessels and inside the kidneys and liver and inner ear, etc. which cause the dry skin and dry eyes "side effects" (direct effects really) seen outside, and the organ damage/dizziness/etc. seen inside. And that it's a teratogen by getting inside cells, damaging them, damaging the DNA/protein building mechanisms causing wider systemic damage which can be long term and is not cleared up by stopping taking Accutane, this is misunderstood as retinoids "mediating hundreds of gene expressions" but is really shotgun chaotic damage and that's why there isn't a single symptom to look for and how it gets diagnosed as many different organ-specific diseases instead of retinoid toxicity damage. And/or causing cellular apoptosis with immune system response to a percieved 'attack', which is then seen as organ damage with immune system activity present, and misdiagnosed as "autoimmune" where the immune system has decided to attack an organ for no reason, which is why autoimmune disorders never have treatments or cures and why they cluster (people with one often get more) despite no good reason that should happen.
And that this whole collection of behaviours is triggered by food with Vitamin A (retinol in the tretinoin family) in it such as dairy and meat fat and Cod Liver oil, and foods with Beta Carotene (retinoids in the same family) such as orange/yellow/dark green coloured fruits and vegetables, and fortified Vitamin A in low-fat dairy and flours and other products through the USA/Europe. And it doesn't take much more than the RDA of Vitamin A to become problematic, and once it builds up in the body beyond the level the body can handle over a few decades, it's like blue touch paper waiting to be lit. Which, he suggests, is why auto-immune disorders cluster together (if you get one, you likely get more), why Eastern Canada Prince Edward Island near a Cod Liver Oil refinery was the highest incidence of Alzheimers in the world and that has been dropping since the refinery closed, and many more connection-between-retinoids-and-disease-states including claims by other people[6].
(I called it a 'fun' idea - it is at least fun along the lines of Tyler Vigen's spurious correlation noticer. https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations even if the main idea is not true).
[1] https://www.acne.org/accutane-in-pregnancy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotretinoin
[3] https://www.acne.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/04-accutane-...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/AccutaneRecovery/comments/1c28jgg/a...
[5] https://ggenereux.blog/my-ebooks/
[6] https://nutritionrestored.com/blog-forum/topic/the-known-his... - blog post about paper observing hypervitaminosis-A bone damage in fossil skeletons, articles observing hysteria in Eskimo women, speculated to be caused by Vitamin A toxicity from Atlantic fish liver (callback to Atlantic coast cod-liver oil refinery), connection between hypervitaminosis A and calcified arteries, connection between hypervitaminosis A and scoliosis, hypervitaminosis A in small animals causes bone growth problems and symptoms of depression.
And HN, it isn't just a few odd balls on HN championing it. I wish there was way to get a sentiment analysis of HN, it seems there are lot more people using it than not using it.
And, what about the silent majority, the programmers that don't hang out on HN? I hear colleagues talk about it all the time.
The impact is here, whether they are self directed or not, or whether there are still a few people not using it.
LLMs as a popularized thing is just about 2 years old. It is still mainly early adopters.
For smartphones it might have taken 10 to 15 years to gain widespread traction.
I think it is safe to say that we are only scratching the surface.
Sounds like early criticisms of the internet. I assume you mean he should be doing those things with a search engine, but maybe we shouldn't allow that either. Force him to use a book! It may be slightly less convenient, and could still be wrong, but...
I just disagree with this. Every b2b or saas is marketing itself as using hallucination free AI.
We're waaaaayyyyyy past the early adoption stage, and the product hasn't meaningfully improved.
When I use LLMs, I use it exactly as Google search on steroids. It's great for providing a summary on some unknown topic. It doesn't matter if it gets it wrong - the main value is in keywords and project names, and one can use the real Google search from there.
And it isn't expensive if you are using the free version
I’ll ask her what her use cases are and reply here later if I don’t forget.
When preparing for a summit, she gave it a list of broad topics she wanted to cover. Gpt generated a list of specific titles and descriptions for her talks. This in turn gave her specific ideas to write talks about instead of just the broad topic.
When she wasn’t sure about the sequence of her talks, she asked GPT for advice on the order. GPT suggested an arrangement that created a logical flow and the reasoning for that flow, which ended up being pretty good.
She often uses gpt as a sounding board for ideas. She said she likes having an always-available colleague to bounce thoughts off of.
I'd call it a working google search, unlike, you know, google these days.
Actually google's LLM-based search results have been getting better, so maybe this isn't the end of the line for them. But for sophisticated questions (on noncoding topics!) I still always go to chatgpt or claude.
don't worry, Google WILL change this because they don't make money when people find the answer right away. They want people to see multiple ads before leaving the site.
I know tons of people in my social groups that love AI and use it every day in it’s current form.