Artificial Intelligence: Useful, or just Hype

Yes, I am finally going to be commenting on my thoughts on artificial intelligence, and not just natural stupidity.

Anyhow, as part of my day job, where I work for a large bank, which is pushing the adoption of AI as part of every function, and sure there have been many wins doing this.

My thoughts are:

AI is not the solution to everything, and as such, the current trend of shoehorning it into everything can be more than a little annoying.

And no, I am not “anti-AI”; far from it. To me, it’s a very useful tool, but as I said earlier, it's not the solution to everything.

For me, both at the day job and for my other work, I do use it heavily, but only where it can add value, and not just for the sake of jumping on the hype bandwagon.

I have gone as far as running the Large Language Models locally to save some money, and let me really hammer it with things like image analysis.

For those interested in running these models locally, I am using Ollama, which works well and is fairly easy to set up and use. There are others, but this is the one I use most of the time.

On this site, none of the written content is AI-created; I prefer to write things myself, as it helps to get the “human” included in everything, and yes, that includes the blunt reviews and the liberal use of sarcasm

I do use the Grammarly service to correct my really terrible grammar, but I rarely use the “make it clearer” functions. So yes, the walls of text on some of my pages are basically 100% human-created.

With the latest major update to this site, I have made extensive use of Google Gemini to format and debug the page structures, which for me anyway is a very good use case for AI.

Every page here is hand-coded HTML5 and complies with the industry standards, and even supports schema.org LD+JSON and Google rich content.

Without the use of AI, this would have been a nightmare, as while I am good with HTML and CSS, the rich stuff is more than a little alien to me.

Gemini was invaluable in getting the pages to support this stuff, and generally look better and have SEO that’s not shockingly bad.

And yes, my use of Gemini in this case is basically Vibe coding. More on that later.

Generating Images top

That’s the actual page content; the images are another matter.

And no, I am not talking about the mountain of AI slop, that's all over the place, but specific images for specific purposes which are declared as AI-Created.

All of the photos on this site have been taken by me, unless specified otherwise, and where needed have been edited to match my preferred photo style. This editing is done with Photoshop and makes heavy use of some of the impressive AI functions it offers.

Other than that, I have created a few minor page images using the Adobe Firefly image creation service. And yes, all of these are clearly identified as AI-generated. Just look at the image at the top of this page, which was created with Firefly.

I will freely admit that outside of photography I am not even close to artistic, and doing any graphics beyond stick figures is not my strong point.

Vibe Coding top

This is the process of getting one of the many AI models to write code for you, which sounds good and useful, which it is; just be aware of the following:

I freely admit programming is not my strong point, although I can write scripts, so I am a heavy vibe code user, both at home and during the day job. However, noting the above points, I use it in a different way, which some people think I am nuts doing.

When I use AI to create code for me, I first am very careful with the prompt, trying to be as clear as possible to make sure it at least has a chance of getting a basic understanding of what I am trying to do.

Once it's created code for me, and I have done basic testing, I also ask it to explain how what it created works and some of the reasoning behind it.

Yes, this does slow things down, but to me it's got the major advantage of helping me get an understanding of what it's created, and such makes me more confident in using its creation.

Even with the time taken for me to get the model to explain things to me, it's still much faster than me manually writing code, and the quality is/should be better. In short, a good use case for AI

Closing Thoughts top

To repeat myself, AI is not the solution to every problem; rather, it's a very powerful tool, but not a universal fix for everything.

Ignore the hype, and think something like, "If I use AI for this, will it add value", and not just be another buzzword for the marketing persons to get excited over.

As for me, I am using AI, and I see no reason to stop; it's just way too useful a tool to be ignored. Just be aware of the talk of the bubble, which, when it eventually busts, will lead to some "interesting" times, given how much money has been invested.