Hi, tech writer here.

I am job hunting (as I left a toxic work environment right before the AI obsession began in corporations). I have been job hunting.

The work disappeared for a good while. And reports from people who weren’t laid off basically came down to them being piled on so high with work they couldn’t manage. One person even reported that her coworkers had nicknamed her AI. ‘Send it to AI.’
Which was hugely demoralizing (understandably) to her.

I know a developer who runs a team: he was made to lay off his tech writer and told ‘just use AI.’ Except he’s in the financial sector. They cannot use it (for security, accuracy, etc.) and when he pointed it out, was told ‘it’s just writing, do it yourself.’

Industries that have realized they cannot use it (government, financial, and medical primarily) are slowly hiring again. But a) the competition is HUGE (great for companies; bad for me), and b) they are hiring 1 person where they used to have 8. I was interviewing for a job with a major credit card company and told that I would be on loan to 4 different departments ‘as needed’ if I got the job.

No one I know (including myself) is refusing to use AI at all. It can be used as a tool. But you still need the experience, the knowledge, the skill to do it right. This is where companies are getting it wrong. They are actively looking for people without experience, without knowledge of their worth to pay barely over minimum wage (you could go to Target for $15/hr and probably better benefits as most of these jobs are also short-term contracts).

There is no ‘get on the train’ for people with decades of experience. For people with families. And every single person who is willing to get paid poorly, get no benefits, and be at risk every single day for their contract to be cut off is just encouraging the companies and hurting everyone else.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

But people on SO don’t generally hallucinate library functions that don’t exist

The main thing I have wanted to use AI for that relates to code is generating regex. I am bad at regex. My brain just does not wrap around it.

And oh my god, they are bad at it. When I told a few dev friends this, they got surprised and then tested on other instances (not just ChatGPT) and found yeah, it spits out a whole mess or sometimes it suddenly veers into turning your request into Python or similar.

Regardless, I do think that reliance is one of the biggest risks with AI. So many people (the number growing everyday; ask a teacher) will just grab whatever ChatGPT spits out without vetting it.

After the first instance of a legal team doing this (and thus submitting filings filled with fake cases and other outright false information), I have been flabbergasted that it just keeps happening and I think this push to ‘get on the train’ is in part to blame.

It is also telling (and I do not think I’ve seen this come up on the thread yet) that the investors in ChatGPT and other AI ventures are starting to pull out because their investments are not paying off.

I am not fully without hope (even though I’ve been unemployed for 2 years and I’ve found myself going back to school; taking on more debt so I can pivot to a new career, despite tech writing being something I love to do) because I do think the bubble will burst. Between the fact that audiences are overwhelmingly underwhelmed by AI content (Disney has come out about several instances where they wanted to openly use it, but it failed for several reasons) and the environmental impact… I think it’s a tech that will fall off the map (and there are some estimating that it will and it will happen in 2026).

I’m too lazy to quote, but there was something said by Mr. Probably An AI or At Least An AI Fanboy about how one of the things that makes something plagiarism is if it causes loss of profit for the person it’s stealing from.

AI has been doing precisely this to… basically every creative field. Visual art, writing, music, now video (remember that horror of a Coca-Cola ad??).

Additionally, the initial training of it utilized stolen works (books, art, film, etc.). The companies have admitted to this. The primary reason they are fighting back in court is because (as they’ve also admitted) to start over would be a massive loss of money for them.

It is theft. Plain and simple. And dude up there admitted it during his roundabout blatherings.

(Also, I hate the ‘but I can’t art’ arguments. Anyone can. Visual art is literally just practicing and training yourself. idgaf if you work 40 hours a week- so do many artists. Step away from the forums, the Fortnite, the RP for like, 30 minutes a day and you can art. Expensive? It can be but to start you literally just need paper and something to make marks with. You can go to Dollar Tree, spend $3, get a pack of printer paper and a box of pens or pencils.)

Now, that said: I am not a omg never touch AI for anything ever. It has its place as a tool (ChatGPT works well for me to brain dump into and then get it to organize my thoughts for me). But I am exhausted by people going ‘I spent 15 minutes typing in prompts my art is real and just as valid as your 80-hour painting!’.

Hell, people shouldn’t even be bragging about ‘prompt engineering.’ Basically every major AI now responds to real language, no need for +this -that in your prompts anymore.

I will echo Apothecary Diaries. I am not a big anime person, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

If you like it, you may enjoy Violet Evergarden, too.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

But people on SO don’t generally hallucinate library functions that don’t exist

The main thing I have wanted to use AI for that relates to code is generating regex. I am bad at regex. My brain just does not wrap around it.

And oh my god, they are bad at it. When I told a few dev friends this, they got surprised and then tested on other instances (not just ChatGPT) and found yeah, it spits out a whole mess or sometimes it suddenly veers into turning your request into Python or similar.

Regardless, I do think that reliance is one of the biggest risks with AI. So many people (the number growing everyday; ask a teacher) will just grab whatever ChatGPT spits out without vetting it.

After the first instance of a legal team doing this (and thus submitting filings filled with fake cases and other outright false information), I have been flabbergasted that it just keeps happening and I think this push to ‘get on the train’ is in part to blame.

It is also telling (and I do not think I’ve seen this come up on the thread yet) that the investors in ChatGPT and other AI ventures are starting to pull out because their investments are not paying off.

I am not fully without hope (even though I’ve been unemployed for 2 years and I’ve found myself going back to school; taking on more debt so I can pivot to a new career, despite tech writing being something I love to do) because I do think the bubble will burst. Between the fact that audiences are overwhelmingly underwhelmed by AI content (Disney has come out about several instances where they wanted to openly use it, but it failed for several reasons) and the environmental impact… I think it’s a tech that will fall off the map (and there are some estimating that it will and it will happen in 2026).

Hi, tech writer here.

I am job hunting (as I left a toxic work environment right before the AI obsession began in corporations). I have been job hunting.

The work disappeared for a good while. And reports from people who weren’t laid off basically came down to them being piled on so high with work they couldn’t manage. One person even reported that her coworkers had nicknamed her AI. ‘Send it to AI.’
Which was hugely demoralizing (understandably) to her.

I know a developer who runs a team: he was made to lay off his tech writer and told ‘just use AI.’ Except he’s in the financial sector. They cannot use it (for security, accuracy, etc.) and when he pointed it out, was told ‘it’s just writing, do it yourself.’

Industries that have realized they cannot use it (government, financial, and medical primarily) are slowly hiring again. But a) the competition is HUGE (great for companies; bad for me), and b) they are hiring 1 person where they used to have 8. I was interviewing for a job with a major credit card company and told that I would be on loan to 4 different departments ‘as needed’ if I got the job.

No one I know (including myself) is refusing to use AI at all. It can be used as a tool. But you still need the experience, the knowledge, the skill to do it right. This is where companies are getting it wrong. They are actively looking for people without experience, without knowledge of their worth to pay barely over minimum wage (you could go to Target for $15/hr and probably better benefits as most of these jobs are also short-term contracts).

There is no ‘get on the train’ for people with decades of experience. For people with families. And every single person who is willing to get paid poorly, get no benefits, and be at risk every single day for their contract to be cut off is just encouraging the companies and hurting everyone else.

I’m too lazy to quote, but there was something said by Mr. Probably An AI or At Least An AI Fanboy about how one of the things that makes something plagiarism is if it causes loss of profit for the person it’s stealing from.

AI has been doing precisely this to… basically every creative field. Visual art, writing, music, now video (remember that horror of a Coca-Cola ad??).

Additionally, the initial training of it utilized stolen works (books, art, film, etc.). The companies have admitted to this. The primary reason they are fighting back in court is because (as they’ve also admitted) to start over would be a massive loss of money for them.

It is theft. Plain and simple. And dude up there admitted it during his roundabout blatherings.

(Also, I hate the ‘but I can’t art’ arguments. Anyone can. Visual art is literally just practicing and training yourself. idgaf if you work 40 hours a week- so do many artists. Step away from the forums, the Fortnite, the RP for like, 30 minutes a day and you can art. Expensive? It can be but to start you literally just need paper and something to make marks with. You can go to Dollar Tree, spend $3, get a pack of printer paper and a box of pens or pencils.)

Now, that said: I am not a omg never touch AI for anything ever. It has its place as a tool (ChatGPT works well for me to brain dump into and then get it to organize my thoughts for me). But I am exhausted by people going ‘I spent 15 minutes typing in prompts my art is real and just as valid as your 80-hour painting!’.

Hell, people shouldn’t even be bragging about ‘prompt engineering.’ Basically every major AI now responds to real language, no need for +this -that in your prompts anymore.

@Gashlycrumb said in AI PBs:

@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:

Are there any other options that might represent a truly ethical source of PB art?

My tabletop players have made HeroForge minis of their PCs. Not actually downloaded them or had them 3d printed or anything, just screenshots of the miniature online. So, it’s free, and I don’t think anybody minds. Mind you they do sometimes buy stuff from HeroForge, too.

I have also seen people use things like BG3 and Cyberpunk’s character creators in a similar fashion for VTT.
(And it’s becoming more common for games to release character creators for free in advance of the game’s release.)