Chicago Headline Club

 

How Using Artificial Intelligence Led to My Insanity

By Wajeeha Iftikhar and Ayman Siddiqui
Karachi, Pakistan

 

AI has been so popular these days. Over and over, we hear things like "Oh, use AI for this," "Use AI for that". There are jobs that require using the right prompts to make AI work for something or another. In today's world, if you do not use AI, people who do, will not look at you like a normal person. AI is sooooooooo useful.... or is it??

Recently I joined a course for Pre-Production, where we were required to do a LOT of work. Of course, we cannot do everything in such a limited time, so we were using AI - it was allowed freely in any case, since the project wasn't a real project, it was just for the course. Although, I would logically ask, if I'm not doing it myself, am I learning it, or is AI learning it instead?

But, back to the main subject, using AI... It did make us work double as hard as we would have otherwise. Frankly, getting roasted while ChatGPT continued to give me the wrong result over and over again - and there's an image limit of 5 per day - where the day starts from the first image you create, whether it is a week later, or 24hrs later at the exact minute - is not my ideal way of spending the night "working". As my friend will tell you below, our brains were fried by the time we managed to get only 10 decent images out of that stupid software - and that was using at least half a dozen ID's each, and working each one to its limits - BOTH of us, which equals a dozen id's multiplied by 5 giving us only that many images.

Who says AI is making things easier? In my personal and very humble opinion, it's not just slowing us down, it's making us NOT use our brains and hence speeding up the degeneration process, especially the brain. We are not filthy rich people to have been able to afford paid AI accounts, hence we were using the free ones. And the results we were getting were not even half as good as the ones we could make ourselves - but we would have required more time, which we did not have.

Even if there's an image limit, we could have lived through that, but there's also a message limit. And not just that, there's also an image UPLOAD limit. We can't send more messages because the limit has exhausted. We have to open a new chat and explain things again, and reupload images. We can't complete the whole discussion or get the whole work done in one chat window. It's really hectic, and in the end not worth wasting so much time at all.

Even when AI makes something correctly, the moment you ask for a small change, it changes everything else too, the expression, environment, and other details. You have

to keep writing and explaining everything repeatedly: it doesn't understand properly in one go. If, even with EXPLICIT instructions to not change anything, it still doesn't follow those instructions, it's not useful at all, it's a hassle.

I have been using AI for development work. It's decent enough. If you know how and what to ask of it. Even so, it'll be buggy enough to give you a headache, but that's the crown of a programar's head, so I don't mind. Besides which, I ask it to explain to me every single line of code, so that, even when NOT using my brain to create that code, I am STILL using it to retain and learn things, hence making use of those brain cells that should be used.

A couple of hours ago I spent more than two hours on getting some pencil sketch images colored. No matter how I explained, it would not listen to my explicit instructions to just color the image and not create a new one. After using a dozen trials - with 3 id's, I won't lie - I ended up with only 3 proper images, and I had needed only 6. If I had known anything about digital painting, I'd have done it myself - with less hassle and no headache.

If someone has a project that needs to be completed in one day, AI would end up taking the whole month to finish it.

Millennials are said to be very adaptive, because we have seen the growth of technology, from a DOS PC with big monitors, to the whole computer inside a smartphone. We know how to use things easily, we can learn faster than our predecessors and have more attention span than the current generation - Gen Alpha. Whereas Gen Z is known to be the Tech Age kids - they were born in the modern era with, metaphorically, mobile phones in their hands. I am a Millennial, and co-writer is Gen Z. If neither of us is satisfied with the AI that claims to be progressing fast enough to start taking over technical jobs, I'd like to see how it manages to do that. We worked together in one class, on one project, with the same AI's. Our experiences were too creepily similar. Hence, we came up with this article, to share what we went through.

If this is AI, I wonder what's the intelligence behind it? Because even two-year-olds can do better jobs now. I can safely say, AI can never take over our jobs, because, even after everything, it still needs us humans to give it the right prompts. Creativity is HUMAN, it is ONLY HUMAN - no amount of progress can give AI that ability.

(Disclaimer: No AI software was used to edit, rewrite or refine this article. The whole article is the original work of the two authors.)