A friend of mine was helping me to do some screens to make some OBS Studio scenes. We were on discord sharing our workflow via screen share, then he looks for an AI model using a search engine. Then upload an image just to cut the white background. I told him that easily he could use the magic wand in photoshop or gimp to cut it out, even, if he wanted, customize the settings to achieve saw edges or none of them. The place where he works loads a bunch of work to him, so, he says me that that’s the only way to make the day job done, but, the image that the AI spit out was horrible. The AI not just cut the background, it cut relevant part of the image too, also, it added some transparency to the image. Thing that my buddy had to fix in photoshop adding some black under it in another layer.
I do not know how to talk to him about it, because he was the photoshop guy in highschool and I was the gimp guy in highschool, we always tried to achieve the same things in both softwares, we got pretty good in them. He uses AI for everything now, to add subtitles, to delete content from a video or image, to cut background, etc, just to fix it in photoshop or whatever.
like this:
“dude I love you but AI has, without a doubt, lowered your skills”
What is this sorcery
You’re absolutely right…
- the dude’s reply
and then they fucked.
Did he ask?
Ironically, photoshop does have ai powered tools that remove backgrounds now. Not sure why they are giving themselves extra steps.
Yeah that’s the real red flag here imo. Not keeping up with the tools.
When used correctly, ai can take on a lot of the tedious tasks, which allows the artist to do what they do best: be creative. Removing background is a tedious task.
Harmonize, Generative Fill, and the Neural Filters have all been great additions to Photoshop. They’re the first thing I point to when people ask what gen AI is good for. Now watch Adobe crank up the cost on the Firefly credits.
The thing that’s helped pull people back from AI dependency at work has been to frequently ask “how much time did AI save on the whole thing?”
I mean, ChatGPT is amazing at writing bash scripts. But if you spend 40 minutes iterating over a solution before the clanker gives a usable solution, didn’t AI just cost time?
People refuse to accept they aren’t gaining anything from AI until they repeatedly look at the big picture.
I once tried to use AI to automate a simple task and then i used a simple day to fail to automate that task and did the work by hand. How does anyone think this is “The future”???
I don’t know how to write bash scripts. But I used AI to generate a Bash script to rename some GoPro files a certain way, thinking that they would still be usable in the gopro, but with more descriptive file names, and I spent a long time learning about its output and how it had written in a lot of really good features into the Bash script, which took about half an hour that I was sort of learning. But then it turns out that renaming the files didn’t do what I thought it would do, so overall it was a waste of time.
In IT, you see people do things the hard way so often because it’s what they know and figured out, and changing over to an easy way requires them to relearn and change their workflow, which they just don’t see the point in.
You’ve already suggested to them there’s a better and easier way to do what they need with existing tools instead of AI and they’ve turned it down - I would say leave it there. Something something leading horses to waters.
Some times people do things a way that takes longer because it avoids having to think. It avoids the effort of using the brain, in favor of spending more time doing something simple and easy.
This is one of the dangers of AI. The mental equivalent of getting out of shape because you drive everywhere and never walk.
If I’m completely honest, I’ve felt that with my own use of AI and it’s my primary driver in reducing or outright avoiding its use personally - I’m not learning anything when it codes up crap that barely works, and then debugging that crap later on is a nightmare because I don’t have the requisite experience.
Is it really though? Because would you have actually put in the effort in the first place to build that app?
I am sure in some instances yes, like I grew up wanting to learn a ton of different things and dove in and learned a lot.
On the other hand though, having to dig in and debug in a way actually is teaching you, surely not the “proper” way to learn and there are absolutely downsides regardless, but I’d posit it’s still better then simply not doing the thing at all. 🤷
I wanted to set up automatic color lighting based on various factors in node-red, I didnt know shit about node-red though I’m familiar with low-code tools like powerautomate so some of that knowledge helped but I was still extremely out of my depth on where to even begin.
So I asked AI, and within a couple days I had it functional and learned a lot about how passing messages worked and some typescript too. I very much doubt I would have put in the effort to learn how to do all of that on my own entirely and still did gain knowledge through the process. Absolutely not as much if I took the real time to learn, but I wasn’t going to do that for such an overall low-tier goal and that would absolutely have taken more then a few hours over a couple days lol.
Then again, I am pretty sure I’m some strain of neurodivergent and when I use LLMs I’m not generally asking it to “do it all” for me, rather I ask how to do very specific tasks and “put it together” myself. 🤷
Maybe you could ask him to measure how effective it is, by doing some tasks with ai and without, and measuring the time. If you want to make it non judgmental you could say it’d be helpful for you to hear if it’s really worth the effort of trying some ai yourself. And then if he sees that it doesn’t end up saving (and sometimes costs) him time, he might accept it.
If your friend doesn’t see the correlation between what you wrote in your last paragraph and the irony of it, then I think he may be lacking some comprehensive skills altogether. So no doubt he makes up for it with AI which in return just makes him more numb.
Yea, it has to do with this line of thinking of “AI is a tool, I am using it as a tool, nothing else, I do not depend of it, is a tool”, what impresses me, because they talk like if it were a drug or something.
How about you just let him use the tools he wants? It’s not that deep.
My counter suggestion is to learn to read and absorb what’s being said so you could give a relevant reply.
I dont want to be that guy, but the magic wand in photoshop has also lowered the skill. Its skills fade all the way to the top, yet we keep getting better results.
In comparison with AI, the magic wand does the job better and faster. You can tweak the tool to do a better job while the AI try to do what it thinks you want.
