[tomohelix]

That is because you are comparing it to the cost of a professional.

I personally look at it in a different way. Now, a rando on the street knowing nothing about everything can pop out arts rivaling an experienced illustrator. A completely clueless wet lab scientist can coerce copilot or GPT4 to cobble together an automated data analysis pipeline in a language that they know nothing about.

To a professional, those applications are toys, easily made and take little effort. But to someone who does not know anything about the work, it is amazingly useful and open up many possibilities. That is the power and the use cases for AI right now. They are tools to augment productivity, not replacing it. And in that regard, it is very successful imo.

Whether it will progress to the point where it can outright handle everything from start to finish or not is another question.

[ok_dad]

> arts rivaling an experienced illustrator

Maybe to a lay observer, but that art will not be new, very creative, or technically perfect in any way, sorry.

> lab scientist… data pipeline

No please, they already mess up statistics and code enough, causing bad papers! They don’t know how to code and thus cannot know if that code is correct.

Edit: (I’m posting “too fast” so here’s my last response here for now:)

I’ll concede on point one there, art doesn’t have to be perfect for most uses.

On point two, I think every HN reader has seen how very smart scientists can mess up stats and data even when they write their own code. I’m not saying they are dumb, I’m saying I don’t trust those same folks to be able to find the mistakes an AI makes. Obviously I’m painting with a broad brush here, not every scientist is bad at that, but a large number are, and the current gen AI isn’t trustworthy enough, in my opinion, to let untrained scientists use it and produce important work based on that data.

I would love to eat my words here someday, but this is a hype cycle and although impressive, most AI today is better for marketing and fund raising than serious use.

[tomohelix]

>To a professional, those applications are toys, easily made and take little effort.

I acknowledged that much. Nothing the AI produce will be a masterpiece, but it is serviceable. The alternative is hiring a contractor or getting an intern and spend more money trying to get a slightly better result, in rare cases, might be worse. Not many places are willing to pay that extra cost.

> They don’t know how to code and thus cannot know if that code is correct.

A bit elitist there. These are still highly educated scientists. They might not know how to code, but to say they can't evaluate the output of the code is a bit much. You might not know how to edit the genes in a fish but you can tell if the fish is glowing or not, right?