The AI is taking our jerbs thread

mid_gen

mid_gen

mid_gen

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Since my 2025 bum thread is being consistently derailed by talk of AI and it's impact on the job market, how's about a thread for it here, since it's a hot topic.

My take : People in tech need to understand the technology at least, even if you disapprove/don't want to use it, you are going to get asked about it and be expected to have an opinion, if you're in the job market.
 
I work in higher education (technical not teaching) and it's shocking how many educators are relying on ChatGPT. Our ISP added AI as a blocked by default category and people lost their minds. We had interviews the other week, the candidates were told in advance their task must not include any materials sourced online, just from our SharePoint. 2 out of 4 of them almost instantly tried to access AI tools and received a sten telling off from the web filter!

It's only a matter of time before some teaching and learning is taken over by an AI, and I'm not against that tbh. The potential for tailored education on a per pupil basis is huge.

Oh and I've spent the last 10 years designing myself out of a job with automations and cloud. They haven't found out yet :p
 
It has its positives, but also has a large amount of negatives too, depends on its use case.

I dont use it because of my job and the need to view directly, but have caught others pushing client information into AI to then produce their report, none of them work for the company anymore, which says it all.

The main concern I have with AI is its use in universities and education, there is tons upon tons of videos out there of AI answering student questions, writing reports and more.
 
It's having quite a big impact on the apprenticeship sector because the standards have knowledge criteria and apprentices are using AI instead of what used to be copy/paste plagiarism which was easy to detect.

With AI you can only suspect it and you can't accuse someone unless you're 100% sure it's been used, the detectors are rubbish.

They really need to update the standards as soon as possible and focus on them evidencing skills and behaviours. Written knowledge is becoming essentially worthless.
 
I'm not worried in my job (mortgage lender)......yet. Give it time though.

However I would be concerned if I were working in IT, particularly something like web design or programming.

It might even be there already, if not, it won't be too far off until some idiot like me can talk at an AI program and say, make me a website or program that does xyz, and 5 minutes later it's done, asks you if you want to make changes, enter your card payment details and job done.

No human involved.
 
BUDFORCE said:
I'm not worried in my job (mortgage lender)......yet. Give it time though.

However I would be concerned if I were working in IT, particularly something like web design or programming.

It might even be there already, if not, it won't be too far off until some idiot like me can talk at an AI program and say, make me a website or program that does xyz, and 5 minutes later it's done, asks you if you want to make changes, enter your card payment details and job done.

No human involved.
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Possible now with Cline (a plugin for VS-Code) - you Plan what you want by asking it to create you a website or whatever, then it Actions the creation/modification and Copilot Workspaces, in a similar theme - you plan and apply

You do have to watch out for the AI "hallucinating" though if you don't phrase things correctly with AI
 
BUDFORCE said:
I'm not worried in my job (mortgage lender)......yet. Give it time though.

However I would be concerned if I were working in IT, particularly something like web design or programming.

It might even be there already, if not, it won't be too far off until some idiot like me can talk at an AI program and say, make me a website or program that does xyz, and 5 minutes later it's done, asks you if you want to make changes, enter your card payment details and job done.

No human involved.
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Generally speaking AI is horrific at coding anything visual related
 
D.P. said:
in general it is horrific at programming anything much more than Hello World.
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I'd agree, but the responses you will get on Reddit are usually along the lines of "OMG U need to prompt better dude"

No.

It's crap.

It can take something super basic and craft it from nothing.

Anything more intensive than that (eg 95% of actual implementations) and you will get a horror show.
 
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There are some things LLMs are incredible at, but coding isn't one of them IMO.


While they can mostly follow syntax and can be used as a kind of smarter interactive copy and paste , they don't actually understand.tue complexity of software.

It is bit like saying that spell checkers will take over fiction writers or lawyers. Spelling is just q shallow part of language that machines do well at because the scope is highly constrained.


LLMs are nothing more than next token predictors, mich like sending an sms on an old Nokia phone. Purply probability of the next token.



While this is quite surprising in capabilities, it is not not comprehensively analysing tye entirety of a software system.


I say this as someone who is actively researching methods to replace humans for coding like tasks, mostly text2sql and NLI to analytics etc. I have stacks of patents and peer reviewed papers on the matter. I only have this because LLLMs are natively so far from being able to code.


When genAI has taken over software engineering, it has already replaced 90% of jobs done sat at a computer . It is going to be one of tte last jobs to go and society wull be massively different.
 
In terms of how people use it, and the ethical nature etc, I honestly feel like it's all the same stuff I heard 20-30 years ago about "the internet" and "wikipedia". Teachers were saying that you couldn't research on the internet, because it was cheating, and it was going to be wrong. And, yeah, if you just took the first link and copy-pasted it, sure. But if you actually took the time to use it properly, it could save a bunch of time and you'd still come out with a decent output.

AI is much the same.

If you use it well, it's not going to beat a professional, but it'll do a job - in much the same way search engines could. It's just a lot quicker and easier to apply.

Coding is a good example, in that I don't code. But I wanted to create a script to do some quick manipulation on email addresses, and ChatGPT wrote a working powershell script in 10 seconds which I tested and works perfectly. It's nothing complicated, but saved me quite a long time of hunting around on stackoverflow and the like.
 
Jim99 said:
In terms of how people use it, and the ethical nature etc, I honestly feel like it's all the same stuff I heard 20-30 years ago about "the internet" and "wikipedia". Teachers were saying that you couldn't research on the internet, because it was cheating, and it was going to be wrong. And, yeah, if you just took the first link and copy-pasted it, sure. But if you actually took the time to use it properly, it could save a bunch of time and you'd still come out with a decent output.

AI is much the same.

If you use it well, it's not going to beat a professional, but it'll do a job - in much the same way search engines could. It's just a lot quicker and easier to apply.

Coding is a good example, in that I don't code. But I wanted to create a script to do some quick manipulation on email addresses, and ChatGPT wrote a working powershell script in 10 seconds which I tested and works perfectly. It's nothing complicated, but saved me quite a long time of hunting around on stackoverflow and the like.
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Absolutely


As i said on the other thread, Ai foe the time being is a small efficiency bump which software engineering has seen every few years for the last 75. Advanced IDEa with syntax highlighting and.code auto completion didn't remove jobs, it made it easier to write more complex code.
 
Jim99 said:
Coding is a good example, in that I don't code. But I wanted to create a script to do some quick manipulation on email addresses, and ChatGPT wrote a working powershell script in 10 seconds which I tested and works perfectly. It's nothing complicated, but saved me quite a long time of hunting around on stackoverflow and the like.
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Same reason I use it, I pay for the monthly sub. Even if the script doesn’t work, I can work out what is wrong and fix it.
 
To be honest, I'd argue that the fact AI is so good at helping kids people "pass courses" or even passing them entirely by itself, argues against the quality of teaching curriculums to an extent.

I know people that have tested AI's like chatGPT against certain courses, talking level 2-3 and to a lesser extent degree level work where they entirely use ChatGPT or other models and change bits and bobs in the copying schoolwork sense and they've passed their courses or graded well on papers with little issue.

AI is a potentially excellent teaching tool and way to source relevant information, if educating people is only about making them memorise things rather than understand them education is failing.
 
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D.P. said:
in general it is horrific at programming anything much more than Hello World.
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It's pretty decent at most things I ask of it. Even qwen-2.5-coder:1.5b or 7b produces decent C++.

It's not there yet with the high level architecture side of it, but loads of models out there can knock out really good code to do specific tasks.

Done quite a few useful powershell and VBA things at in the last year, saves so much time not having to refresh myself on the languages, just ask Copilot and bosh, working script is done in a few minutes.
 
AI Slop is a real thing for sure. Zero fear of it taking over my role. What I like about LLMs is their ability to break down fairly dense log files into manageable sections and it can highlight things that might be relevant.
 
Gray2233 said:
AI is a potentially excellent teaching tool and way to source relevant information, if educating people is only about making them memorise things rather than understand them education is failing.
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That's been the education system for decades.....but that a different conversation. :D

What makes me laugh, recruiters and hiring managers complaining about people using AI to write their CV's when applying for jobs.

"If your CV has been written by AI or our system has detects its been writing by AI. It will be filtered out!!"

When all these years they have been using Applicant Tracking Systems and applicants have been trying to find ways to get around it. Now we have AI to get around ATS, recruiters and hiring managers don’t like when they had to upper hand for so long :rolleyes:

The tables have now turned thanks to public AI platforms :)
 
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In terms of coding chatgpt and the like are just another abstraction layer you have to be able to use. I don't see it completely replacing coders because if you don't know how to prompt it and debug it you will still end up with useless buggy code. Programmers will still be sought after and so will "prompt engineers"
 
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