Two kinds of AI users are emerging

Posted by martinald 5 days ago

Two kinds of AI users are emerging(martinalderson.com)

354 points | 339 commentspage 4

waffletower 4 days ago|

When confined to a Github Copilot Business license, you do have options, as the license does provide access to frontier Anthropic and Google models in addition to its other offerings. Unfortunately it will not work directly with Claude Code without proxy server hacks, but Opencode is an option, and I am interested in learning about others (save for Aider, which I have tried and discarded).

superkuh 5 days ago||

The argument seems to be that having a corporation restrict your ability to present arbitrary text directly to the model and only being able to go through their abstract interface which will integrate your text into theirs (hopefully) is more productive than fully controlling the input text to a model. I don't think that's true generally. I think it can be true when you're talking about non-technical users like the article is.

majormajor 5 days ago|

The use of specialization of interfaces is apparent if you compare Photoshop with Gemini Pro/Nano Banana for targeted image editing.

I can select exactly where I want changes and have targeted element removal in Photoshop. If I submit the image and try to describe my desired changes textually, I get less easily-controllable output. (And I might still get scrambled text, for instance, in parts of the image that it didn't even need to touch.)

I think this sort of task-specific specialization will have a long future, hard to imagine pure-text once again being the dominant information transfer method for 90% of the things we do with computers after 40 years of building specialized non-text interfaces.

duskwuff 5 days ago|||

One reasonable niche application I've seen of image models is in real estate, as a way to produce "staged" photos of houses without shipping in a bunch of furniture for a photo shoot (and/or removing a current tenant's furniture for a clean photo). It has to be used carefully to avoid misrepresenting the property, of course, but it's a decent way of avoiding what is otherwise a fairly toilsome and wasteful process.

majormajor 5 days ago||

This sort of thing (not for real estate, but for "what would this furniture actually look like in this room) is definitely somewhere the open-ended interface is fantastic vs targeted-remove in Photoshop (but could also easily be integrated into a Photoshop-like tool to let me be more specific about placement and such).

I was a bit surprised by how it still resulted in gibberish text on posters in the background in an unaffected part of the image that at first glance didn't change at all. So even just the "masking" ability of like "anything outside of this range should not be touched" of a GUI would be a godsend.

fdsf2 5 days ago|||

It behooves me that Gemini et al dont have these standard video editing tools. Do the engineers seriously think prompting by text is the way people want videos to be generated? Nope. People want to customise. E.g. Check out capcut in the context of social media.

Ive been trying to create a quick and dirty marketing promo via an LLM to visualise how a product will fit into the world of people - it is incredibly painful to 'hope and pray' that by refining the prompt via text you can make slight adjustments come through.

The models are good enough if you are half-decent at prompting and have some patience. But given the amount invested, I would argue they are pretty disappointing. Ive had to chunk the marketing promo into almost a frame-by-frame play to make it somewhat work.

suprstarrd 5 days ago||

Speaking as someone who doesn't like the idea of AI art so take my words with a grain of salt, but my theory is that this input method exclusivity is intentional on their part, for exactly the reason you want the change. If you only let people making AI art communicate what they want through text or reference attachments (the latter of which they usually won't have), then they have to spend time figuring out how to put it into words. It IS painful to ask for those refinements, because any human would clearly understands it. In the end, those people get to say that they spent hours, days, or weeks refining "their prompt" to get a consistent and somewhat-okay looking image; the engineers get to train their AI to better understand the context of what someone is saying; and all the while the company gets to further legitimize a false art form.

maffyoo 5 days ago||

this seems reasonable but isn't the conclusion a statement what we already know. These tools are really powerful, but with the ability to cause significant pain, need organisations to adapt, so that they can make best use of them but this is fraught with security problems. AI looks a lot like a technology problem but ultimately, to most small businesses, it's a procurement and change management problem.

Also (I appreciate the authors message here but..)

"Excel on the finance side is remarkably limiting when you start getting used to the power of a full programming ecosystem like Python"

With the addition of lambdas Excel formulae are Turing complete. no more need for VBA in a (mostly) functional environment.

Also on this, Claude for Excel needs a lot of work (as does any tool working with financial models) if you have ever used them in anger I dont think you'll be relying on them with your non-technical finance manager for a while...

fny 4 days ago||

Software engineers don't understand how user hostile all these AI gizmos are. Terminals are scary. AI running local code is scary. Random Github software is scary. And in my experience, normies are far more security paranoid than developers when it comes to AI.

riskable 4 days ago|

Normies have a much more realistic take on AI than technical people or semi-technical "power users":

    * They LOVE image-generating AI and AI that messes with their own photos/videos.
    * They will ask ChatGPT, Gemini, etc and just believe the result.
    * They will ask Copilot to help them make a formula in Excel and be happy to be done.

The common theme here is they don't care. To them, AI is just a neat thing. It's not a huge difference in their lives. They don't think about the environmental impact much unless someone tells them it's bad, via a high-quality video stream that itself was vastly worse for the environment than any AI conversation or image generation ever could be.

They will play a game 100% made by AI because their friend said it was fun. They don't care that some AAA publisher lost a sale on their "human made for sure, just trust us :nod:" identical game because the bored person was able to pull of something good enough with little effort (and better design decisions).

They also don't care if some article or book or whatever was written partially or entirely by AI as long as it's good. The AI part just isn't important to them. Not even a little bit!

hxugufjfjf 4 days ago||

Its kind of funny how it’s the exact same discussion as we used to have about privacy in the advent of social media. "I’m not worried, I got nothing to hide!" The convenience benefits of Facebook (in the beginning, likely less nowadays) massively outweighed the privacy concerns of the layman or woman.

iqandjoke 4 days ago||

It is like saying Apple is using Claude Code internally while selling you to use Apple Intelligence https://x.com/tbpn/status/2016911797656367199

srinath693 5 days ago||

The real divide isn't technical vs. non-technical: it's people with new problems vs. people maintaining old solutions. AI is incredible at generating first drafts of anything. It's terrible at understanding why the existing thing is the way it is.

fortran77 5 days ago||

I know it's fun to bash Microsoft, but--while Claude is better, Microsoft's Copilot is far from "awful". I've used it productively with the VS Code integration for some esoteric projects: PIC PIO programming and Verilog.

mike_hearn 5 days ago|

He's talking about the Copilot in other apps for non-programmers.

chrisjj 5 days ago||

> Thirdly, this all needs to be wrapped up in some sort of secure mechanism

Putting that first would have saved the bother of putting the second and third.

chrisjj 5 days ago||

> It can effectively replace nearly every standard productivity app out there

May we see the "agentic" replacement for Word, please?

Havoc 5 days ago|

The copilot button in excel at my work can’t access the excel file of the window it’s in. As in “what’s in cell A1” and it says I can’t read this file. Not even sure what the point is then frankly.

I’m happily vibe coding at work but yeah article is right. MS has enterprise market share by default not by merit. Stunning contrast between what’s possible and what’s happening in big corp

cmrdporcupine 5 days ago||

Meanwhile the people I know who work at Microsoft say there's a constant whip-cracking to connect everything they're doing to "AI" and prove that's what they're doing.

PunchyHamster 5 days ago||

so whole company decided to collectively half-ass it so managers fuck off ? :D

Havoc 4 days ago|||

Follow up on this - seems it’s connected to the type of excel files. It cant read xlsb ie binary excel

So it is connected…user just needs to somehow know/intuit (?!?!) that they need to convert the workbook

bwat49 5 days ago||

yeah I actually use AI a lot, but copilot is... useless. When microsoft adds copilot to their various apps they don't seem to put any thought/effort behind it beyond sticking a copilot button somewhere.

And if the copilot button does nothing but open a chat window without any real integration with the app, what the hell is the point of that when there's already a copilot button in the windows taskbar?

chrisjj 5 days ago||

You have overestimated the intelligence of the target audience :)

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