We are resellers for various academic publishers. One of the things we do is send out email campaigns to our lists of researchers and librarians. All very boring. One of the main roles for the marketing assistant was writing the copy for the email. Here are 10 reasons why our new AI eBook collection is so much better then the last eBook collection I sold you a month ago type of thing. Generative AI is pretty good at "writing" that sort of thing with minimal editing needed. However, it's a very simple task its doing, basically summarising marketing material and publisher websites into snappy emails. What we have now with Generative AI is a long way from Artificial general intelligence (AGI) that could match or surpass human capabilities across all cognitive tasks. As it happen we sell a **** ton of books on AI all written by humans....so far.
Shouldn't get totally carried away with AI being the future, but we can at least rely on it for the simple stuff ...
Pretty standard und equivalent to new graduates nowadays ever since universities became businesses and not centres of excellance https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMf0cKQN2VX/
I’ve been using my companies co-pilot as a research assistant and it’s been doing a great job, basically better than Google search as it will summarise and tabulate results. I find as long as you get it to cite sources so you can check that it is reasonable accurate then it’s great then i fed it a lengthy pdf document and asked it to extract a certain table as i needed to use it in a Word document and update it. Total disaster and I got my first example of AI hallucinating where it basically made stuff up. I spent so long arguing with it to try and get it to do the job that I could have recreated it myself from scratch. So I’m left with using it as a better search engine, improving written English, basic summarisation. I’ve no doubt it will improve. I do worry though that I started off my career doing all the basic research for more experienced people and producing tables of information, filling in forms and summarising. If we use AI to do this then how are young people going to get the experience that they build in to end up in my job in 30 years time. If I’m honest I think my job will probably be obsolete in 5 - 10 years, which is ok by me as I’ll be looking at retirement.
