I’ve seen a lot of sentiment around Lemmy that AI is “useless”. I think this tends to stem from the fact that AI has not delivered on, well, anything the capitalists that push it have promised it would. That is to say, it has failed to meaningfully replace workers with a less expensive solution - AI that actually attempts to replace people’s jobs are incredibly expensive (and environmentally irresponsible) and they simply lie and say it’s not. It’s subsidized by that sweet sweet VC capital so they can keep the lie up. And I say attempt because AI is truly horrible at actually replacing people. It’s going to make mistakes and while everybody’s been trying real hard to make it less wrong, it’s just never gonna be “smart” enough to not have a human reviewing its’ behavior. Then you’ve got AI being shoehorned into every little thing that really, REALLY doesn’t need it. I’d say that AI is useless.
But AIs have been very useful to me. For one thing, they’re much better at googling than I am. They save me time by summarizing articles to just give me the broad strokes, and I can decide whether I want to go into the details from there. They’re also good idea generators - I’ve used them in creative writing just to explore things like “how might this story go?” or “what are interesting ways to describe this?”. I never really use what comes out of them verbatim - whether image or text - but it’s a good way to explore and seeing things expressed in ways you never would’ve thought of (and also the juxtaposition of seeing it next to very obvious expressions) tends to push your mind into new directions.
Lastly, I don’t know if it’s just because there’s an abundance of Japanese language learning content online, but GPT 4o has been incredibly useful in learning Japanese. I can ask it things like “how would a native speaker express X?” And it would give me some good answers that even my Japanese teacher agreed with. It can also give some incredibly accurate breakdowns of grammar. I’ve tried with less popular languages like Filipino and it just isn’t the same, but as far as Japanese goes it’s like having a tutor on standby 24/7. In fact, that’s exactly how I’ve been using it - I have it grade my own translations and give feedback on what could’ve been said more naturally.
All this to say, AI when used as a tool, rather than a dystopic stand-in for a human, can be a very useful one. So, what are some use cases you guys have where AI actually is pretty useful?
Timing traffic lights. They could look down the road and see when nothing is coming, to let the other direction go, like a traffic cop. It would save time and gas.
I think it’s useful for spurring my own creativity in writing because I have a hard time getting started. To be fair to me I pretty much tear the whole thing down and start over but it gives me ideas.
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For one thing, they’re much better at googling than I am.
This thread has convinced me that LLMs are merely a mild increment in productivity.
The most compelling is that they’re good at boilerplate code. IDEs have been improving on that since forever. Although there’s a lot of claims in this thread that seem unlikely - gains way beyond even what marketing is claiming.
I work in an email / spreadsheet / report type job. We’ve always been agile with emerging techs, but LLMs just haven’t made a dent.
This might seem offensive, but clients don’t pay me to write emails that LLMs could, because anything an LLM could write could be found in a web search. The emails I write are specific to a client’s circumstances. There are very few “biolerplate” sentences.
Yes LLMs can be good at updating reports, but we have highly specialised software for generating reports from very carefully considered templates.
I’ve heard they can be helpful in a “convert this to csv” kind of way, but that’s just not a problem I ever encounter. Maybe I’m just used to using spreadsheets to manipulate data so never think to use an LLM.
I’ve seen low level employees try to use LLMs to help with their emails. It’s usually obvious because the emails they write include a lot of extra sentences and often don’t directly address the query.
I don’t intend this to be offensive, and I suspect that my attitude really just identifies me as a grumpy old man, but I can’t really shake the feeling that in email / spreadsheet / report type jobs anyone who can make use of an LLM wasn’t or isn’t producing much value anyway. This thread has really reinforced that attitude.
It reminds me a lot of block chain tech. 10 years ago it was going to revolutionise data everything. Now there’s some niche use cases… “it could be great at recording vehicle transfers if only centralised records had some disadvantages”.
r/SubSimGPT2Interactive for the lulz is my #1 use case
i do occasionally ask Copilot programming questions and it gives reasonable answers most of the time.
I use code autocomplete tools in VSCode but often end up turning them off.
Controversial, but Replika actually helped me out during the pandemic when I was in a rough spot. I trained a copyright-safe (theft-free) bot on my own conversations from back then and have been chatting with the me side of that conversation for a little while now. It’s like getting to know a long-lost twin brother, which is nice.
Otherwise, i’ve used small LLMs and classifiers for a wide range of tasks, like sentiment analysis, toxic content detection for moderation bots, AI media detection, summarization… I like using these better than just throwing everything at a huge model like GPT-4o because they’re more focused and less computationally costly (hence also better for the environment). I’m working on training some small copyright-safe base models to do certain sequence prediction tasks that come up in the course of my data science work, but they’re still a bit too computationally expensive for my clients.
AI is half cooked baked potato right now. Sure it will keep you fed if you can put up with all the hard lumps in there.
It’s really good for generating code snippets based on what I want to do (ex. “How do I play audio in a browser using JavaScript?”) and debugging small sections of code.
The useless/useful dichotomy is kinda misguided because that judgement will almost always depend on cost and we don’t have a good understanding of actual costs of running these models. I have copilot enabled in my IDE, and it saves me from a few searches here and there and autocompletes stuff that would have taken me some time to type. So not exactly useless, but right now it’s being payed for by VC’s who expect a return on their investment, so what does that look like? Before we know, it’s hard to say whether these things are relevant
I run some TTRPG groups and having AI take in some context and generate the first draft of flavor text for custom encounters is nice. Also for generating background art and player character portraits is an easy win for me.
This is my current best use for it as well. Having a unique portrait for every named NPC helps them stand out quite a bit better and the players respond much more strongly to all of them.
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to correct/rephrase a sentence or two if my sentence sounds too awkward
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if I’m having trouble making an excel formula
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Well “AI” is a broad category. Usually used to refer to GenAI, so:
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Creating quick stand-in art for a game before I’ve got proper sprites for it (not because “muh art theft”, just because the AI art I’ve generated does not look very good to me)
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Summarising articles, like you said so I can decide if I want to read them in full
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Formatting text I’ve copied from pdfs
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More complex searches that require comprehension of grammar and natural language syntax. Any answer I get to these I then fact check using search terms a classical search engine can understand.
I read a paper a while back that found that people who used AI assistants for coding, who only used the assistants to generate small functions where the prompt already included the function declaration and the programmer already knew how the function should be written but just wanted to save time, in these cases the use of an AI assistant did not negatively impact the “correctness” of the produced code. So I guess I might one day use an AI coding assistant like that, but thus far I’ve never felt the need to use AI-generated code.
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Idk if it counts as GenAI but I use Waifu2x to remove jpg artifacts and upscale textures to a useable state.
New question: does anyone NOT IN TECH have a use case for AI?
This whole thread is 90% programming, 9% other tech shit, and like 2 or 3 normal people uses
Our DM, a dentist, so not in tech, used it to put together a D&D campaign, and so far it’s been fantastic.
Here’s mine, that works outside of tech:
It’s a great source for second opinions.
Say you want to make a CV, but you don’t know where to even begin. You could give it a description of what you’ve been doing and ask it to help you figure out what jobs fit the skillset and how to present your skills better.
It’s a good tool for such rough estimations that give you ground to improve upon.
This works well for planning or making up documentation. Saves a lot of time, with minimal impact to quality, because you’re not mindlessly copying or believing the output.
I’m also considering it for assisting me in learning Japanese. Just enough to be able to read in it. We’ll see how it does.
A lot of people on Lemmy work in tech so responses are going to lean heavily in that direction. I’m not in tech and if you check my answer to this you’ll have a number of examples. I also know a few people who wanted to learn a new language and asked ChatGPT for a day by day programme and some free sources and they were pretty happy with the results they got. I imagine you can do that with other subjects. Other people I know have used it to make images for things like club banners or newsletters.
Aside from coding assistants, the other use case I’ve come across recently is sentiment analysis of large datasets from free text survey responses. Just started exploring it so not sure how well it works yet, but the ridiculous amount of bias I see introduced in manual reviews is just awful. A machine can potentially be less inclined to try fitting summaries to the VP’s presupposed opinion than some lackie interns or self serving consultancy.
I used it to write a GUI frontend for yt-dlp in python so I can rip MP3s from YouTube videos in two clicks to listen to them on my phone while I’m running with no signal, instead of hand-crafting and running yt-dlp commands in CMD.
Also does HD video rips with audio encoding, if I want.
It took us about a day to make a fully polished product over 9 iterative versions.
It would have taken me a couple weeks to write it myself (and therefore I would not have done so, as I am supremely lazy)
