Analyst To AI

One of the things I find challenging is figuring out what to use AI for in my role (that will take advantage of the undeniable benefits of this tool). This was one of the main drivers of why I started writing the blog. I’ve spent so many years working in a similar role and while there has certainly been changes and efficiencies, AI is a harder to work within.

Maybe because it is coming so fast and has so many potential applications. Perhaps it’s too overwhelming to conceive at this point until things settle a little. I think also, unlike other technologies that have come around, AI is less about becoming more efficient and more about giving up control. I mean think of it, we’re prompting it to solve problems and answer questions. It’s designed to answer what it thinks we want to hear, not necessarily what we should hear. Try an experiment by asking AI a question, then keep prompting it to come up with another answer. I bet you can do it.

My point is that when you ask AI to do a task, you MUST check it for accuracy. It’s a known issue that AI can give “hallucination” responses.

AI hallucination is a phenomenon where, in a large language model (LLM) often a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool, perceives patterns or objects that are nonexistent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ai-hallucinations

So, while it is a great tool, it’s still in the early stages. We can experiment, but we can’t quite trust yet.

What I will try to use it for:

1. Tasks – ask it to do things that will save time but might not need a lot of reviewing on my part. For example, summarizing articles, creating tables, etc.
2. Searches – Yes, we can use any number of the search engines that we’ve relied on for so long. I’ve discovered that AI does a pretty good job of summarizing the web for a topic I search for. I can read that and either follow a link or have an overview before I search further. This is helpful because I usually always’ look to multiple sources before I believe anything on the internet

I know there are others, but I have yet to figure it out.

Any suggestions are welcome.