The AI Compass
I just stumbled upon Manu’s post about the AI Compass test. Fifteen questions about your relationship with AI, which are supposed to define your archetype and your position on a perceptual map.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, so that was a good opportunity to do so.
I took the quiz, and here’s my archetype:
The Shrug
AI is a thing that exists and you regard it with detached amusement, like everything else. It’s overhyped, sure, but so is most stuff. You’ll use it when it’s useful and ignore it when it isn’t, and you find the discourse more interesting than the technology. You are unbothered.
Is it accurate? Well… Yes and no. I’m indeed quite detached regarding AI, like a lot of things. It exists, it can be handy even useful, and I use it regularly for specific needs. I also think it’s overhyped, and I often feel that well-known “AI fatigue”. I’m quietly tired of seeing AI everywhere, and listening to people that want to use AI just for the sake of using AI (especially in companies).
There was a time when I was hyped by AI, particularly by image generation and when DALL·E 2 was opened to the public. It was actually the reason I opened this blog, back in August 2022 (since then, the few articles about DALL·E 2 are gone, but they can easily be found).
But nowadays, I’ve grown bored with the evolution of AI and I’m not really interested in how it is evolving. I might talk about it with friends if someone starts a discussion on it, I might read a piece of news if I stumble on it… But I won’t use my time looking for AI News and watching keynotes about AI. I care about AI when I’m using it, otherwise, I couldn’t care less.
I used to find the discourse interesting, but not anymore. I’m more impressed by what AI can do regarding tech (code, image generation, for example).
I think AI is a tool. As I wrote earlier, it’s sometimes useful. But it’s nothing else. Sometimes, it helps me save time for repetitive boring stuff (most of the time related to my daily job). I also use it to generate images and pieces of code for this blog or for other personal stuff, to debug tech errors, or for English proofreading (but never to generate and write a piece of text that I would consider mine). That being said, AI is definitely not something that became the first thing that comes to my mind when I have a project to do, a problem to solve or a topic I want to search about.
Oh, and just something that came to my mind while writing this post: one thing that annoys and worries me is the direction traditional search engines (Google, even DuckDuckGo) are taking by implementing AI. It doesn’t bother me for my blog’s visibility, I don’t really care about that, but for how the way we do research, and the results we get, will be impacted.