Using AI in my work

I was recently asked to say what my approach to AI would be in a new contract. It’s something I have thought about a lot but I’ve never been asked to put it in writing. 

This morning, I read a post from Professor Alice Roberts…

“I’ve reached the point – well actually, I reached it a while ago – where I’m militantly anti-AI. Fine – use it in bioscience labs and radiology where it might help analyse data more effectively. Use it sparingly for systems engineering. Everywhere else, it can fuck off.

“For years – decades – we’ve been imploring people to save trees by using less paper, to conserve water by flushing less for urine than faeces, to save energy by switching off lightbulbs. This year, Europe roasted in unbelievably high temperatures. Glaciers collapse, disasters ensue. And then we’re expected to ignore all that because we can make fun AI images and google can badly summarise Wikipedia. Seriously. Fuck off.”

Professor Alice Roberts on BlueSky

She said it a lot better than I did! 

I put recycled paper in my printer, I reuse scrap paper to make shopping lists, I switch off lights, I turn the heating down, I recycle my waste where I can, I drive an electric car. I try to do my bit and I’ve been doing that for years. If I think all of that is important then I can think twice before making AI the easy option.

I do use it occasionally and sometimes it is hard to avoid. Just this week I uploaded a receipt to my accounting software and I enjoyed the new feature that was able to extract all the info from a photo (I guess I might switch that off actually as how hard is it to enter a few numbers to an app?).

I’m not denying that AI has its place but I am putting in writing that I will only use it sparingly. 

💚 I will not use it to create images – that’s a hard line for me 

💚 I won’t use it to analyse data that includes personal or identifying information

💚 If you read something written by me then the words are all mine