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AI is untrustworthy and shouldn't be used
I have management talking about copilot usage rates and I hear people casually refer to "what ChatGPT told them" in conversation
I have a more nuanced take. AI is simultaneously untrustworthy and useful. For many queries, DuckDuckGo and Google are performing considerably worse than they used to, while Perplexity usually yields good results. Perplexity also handles complex queries traditional search engines just can't.
About a third of the time, Perplexity's text summary of what it found is inaccurate; it may even say the opposite of what a source does. Reading the sources and evaluating their reliability is no less important than with traditional search, but much of the time I think I wouldn't have found the same sources that way.
Of course there are other issues with AI, such as power usage and Perplexity in particular being known for aggressive web scraping.
Nuance and depth isn't as popular as I'd like on or off Lemmy.
I've found it to be extremely useful for stuff like one-off powershell commands that I'll use like 3x in my career.
Just today I was trying to find the command line switches for disk2vhd, and none of the top results, even the official page for the app, had them.
But Google's AI had them and provided sources I could use to verify the information.
But people didn't do that last part before AI, so I can see why it's an issue.
Absolutely. I recently needed to satisfy auditors with a report on our network security. Our main guy was on leave, but I quickly got the evidence I needed with a few powershell commands that I would have previously spent way more time googling.
It's also decent at reports and short, impersonal emails to suppliers etc. It frees up a lot of my time to do actual work, and for that I think it's decent.
Like basically everything in life, the truth is between the extremes. For me it's useful, but doesn't replace me and my team. I'm neither an AI evangelist or detractor. It's just another tool.