How Will AI Influence My Future Of Work?

Alessandro Pedori has worked with language technology since 2012, after machine translation pushed him out of translating and back into programming. In his talk at Freelance Unlocked 2024 he describes what AI can do for freelancers' work as of May 2024. He calls himself an engineer, not a futurist, and sticks to the next six months.

**What the talk covers**

- His own mind-blown moment: a student's coding problem that took him 20 minutes was solved by ChatGPT in 20 to 30 seconds. He suggests about ten hours with a good model, first to feel that, then to find its limits.
- The limits, by his account: models cannot count words, forget unless you build memory in, plan badly and lack common sense. A demo that works 90 to 95 percent of the time can impress a board, he says, but not where reliability matters.
- Four questions before you automate: is it possible, is it good for me, is it ethical and legal, and does it pay off against how often you do the task? He finds input, output and classification tasks easy and is uneasy about taking humans out of decisions.
- Test an idea with the tools anyone can buy. If a couple of hours of research do not solve it, it is probably hard.
- The interface is often the weak point. In a drugstore project, ordering by voice assistant worked technically, but nobody wanted to order toilet paper by voice.
- Where people stay useful: understanding the task, common sense and judgement.

**From the Q&A**

He expects bigger context windows and fewer made-up answers. On creativity, he says we mostly want novels written by humans, and chess is more popular than ever.

**Who it's for**

Freelancers who want a sober view of AI tools in 2024 and a way to test them on their own work.