Race against the machine

It’s all over the news: “AI will take over all our jobs”, “mass layoffs because of AI”, “anxiety whether humans will be replaced”, and so on and so on

ChatGPT says it in its own way: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our daily lives, transforming the way we interact, consume content, and even create. The rapid growth of AI technologies has brought forth a new era, empowering us to live more efficiently and make better decisions. Rather than fear what AI can take over, it’s better to learn how to utilize it, otherwise the next job that it replaces will be yours.”

Okay, back to my own writing. AI is already used in a wide array of other use cases, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll narrow this down to 3 tools I have been using daily. Let’s focus on a few that have really boosted my productivity like crazy. 

ChatGPT 

Obviously this is the number one most popular AI platform right now. At first it might appear like a tech demo or chat bot, but ChatGPT can help with almost every facet of your life. It will generate well researched and human-like responses to a wide range of questions. One of the most underrated uses of ChatGPT is that it serves as an educational resource, offering detailed answers to complex questions and providing pretty hard to find information on various subjects. You can pick any topic and it will break down and even answer followup questions to make sure you get the whole picture. In fact I ask ChatGPT questions a lot of times before asking friends just to get some context and it typically gives a great answer. As for blog content, it still lacks that “human touch”, but it does fill in context nicely. Just a few days ago, Code Interpreter was released as a plugin, which can analyze data and create quick python scripts for plotting data or doing mathematical equations. Overall ChatGPT will keep being the industry standard for general purpose questions and tasks. 

If you’re not using ChatGPT, you’re:

• Churning out content slower than others 
• Not getting detailed answers to questions as fast as others 
• Spending more time doing the thinking of technical or even business design
• Not getting quick second opinions or double checks 
• Not brainstorming or coming up with ideas as fast as others can
• …the list goes on here even beyond my domain

Codeium

Codeium is an AI-powered coding assistant that offers code autocomplete, chat, and search. This app has helped me create scripts that organize data or even help churn a large dataset into single files without needing to bug anyone or google how to write code. It is helpful for both beginner and experienced programmers since it suggests code as you describe it, and even as you type it. I’d imagine if you really didn’t even need to learn programming you could still get by with Codeium. Best of all? It’s free for non-Enterprise users. If you want to get it for your company, they even have a self hosted (on prem or virtual) solution so that the code doesn’t get sent out. Recently companies like Samsung have banned AI solutions like ChatGPT because employees leaked sensitive data. 

Some teams have thrived on these code autocomplete solutions, you can imagine that even with ChatGPT and Codeium you could probably develop faster than 2x the pace because you don’t get stuck on bugs as often. You would also skip over a lot of design thinking and unit testing as well. Overall this is a game changer obviously for current developers, but even if you are new to programming it can help with putting things together to boost your learning.

If you’re not using Codeium you’re:

• Taking longer than 30% to simply type code
• Getting stuck on debug or logic thinking process
• Not automating your unit test creation as easily
• Looking at other coding reference sheets because you don’t remember all the syntax
• Missing out on debug, architecture, commenting automation
• Taking longer to search for your files in your repo
• Not interfacing with the chat on refactoring or making your code more readable and efficient
• Or you’re switching between other autocomplete solutions and ChatGPT
• Sending your data to OpenAI or Microsoft

Stable Diffusion

With Stable Diffusion, the sky's the limit, if you can think of it, you can generate an image (or even video) of it. By typing out what the image should look like, you can keep iterating until you find something that works and even modify or change the dimensions as needed. Other cloud based solutions of this are only free for a certain amount of uses, and after charging you, you’ll also realize that their feature set is limited too. The exception is Midjourney, who clearly has the best and most photorealistic training model compared to others, but it is not as customizable. With Stable Diffusion, it’s an open source and free platform, and people are clamoring to add more and more features organically. In fact, models and extensions are being developed everyday that it’s hard to keep up with the pace! The awesome thing about free is you’re able to iterate on way more attempts to find the perfect image you need. I’ve been using it daily to keep up to date with the latest advancements in AI art. I’ve also put images into content like blog or newsletter posts and generating memes for social media. It might be a “fun” tool, but I’ve become quite dependent on it now. 

If you’re not using Generative Art you’re:

• Spending more time and money on images
• Not getting the “perfect” image
• Waiting on someone else to draw the image
• Missing out on posting awesome memes
• Falling behind on the next wave of content innovation

So overall, AI tools have become part of my daily routine, however I would not even consider myself an AI power user. The ironic thing is I am preventing more usage because otherwise I’ll start needing to open my wallet up to more and more things. It reminds me of the streaming content subscriptions that I…wait a second, I’m still paying too much for those. Sigh. You can expect the usage of AI tools to go way up rather than fizzle, and more AI apps are being released every day. Right now, there is a race for AI apps vs. AI consolidation into major platforms. For example Microsoft is gunning for your entire daily activity with AI from their productivity suite, coding, and even art generation. Google is a bit behind, but you can bet they are rolling out things behind the scenes at a breakneck pace. 

Remember, others are already increasing their productivity with AI, and that means you should learn how to also, otherwise, you could get replaced by it.