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?
Currently, mainly just cooking.
In the future, I’m hoping to leverage it to create video content. I’ve actually been disappointed in its usefulness for writing sci-fi, it tends to want to argue. But based on the surreal images that it can created I am hoping that can be translated into creating 3D scenes that can be used to extract video.
It’s been pretty helpful in writing fantasy, but most of what it spits out is sort of… Surface level kids stuff, to be honest. But it has helped come up with a few interesting twists when I’m stuck. It’s not something they could write a story for you, but it has helped when I need, like, “I have scene A, in which X happens, and even C, in which y happens, help me bridge them by writing scene B.” It’ll give me some sort of like bedtime story level writing, and then I go in and completely redo it, but it gets me unstuck. The paid ones may be better, but I’m not spending money on them, I just use the free ones.
I use a lot of AI/DL-based tools in my personal life and hobbies. As a photographer, DL-based denoising means I can get better photos, especially in low light. DL-based deconvolution tools help to sharpen my astrophotos as well. The deep learning based subject tracking on my camera also helps me get more in focus shots of wildlife. As a birder, tools like Merlin BirdID’s audio recognition and image classification methods are helpful when I encounter a bird I don’t yet know how to identify.
I don’t typically use GenAI (LLMs, diffusion models) in my personal life, but Microsoft Copilot does help me write visualization scripts for my research. I can never remember the right methods for visualization libraries in Python, and Copilot/ChatGPT do a pretty good job at that.
I have enough education and skill and talent to not need AI.
Sorry for the rest of you. Not really.
I put this comment into chatgpt and it diagnosed you with narcissistic personality disorder.
But I’m sure you already knew that.
Hopefully AI will help aid social skills at some point.
What a lucky day it will be for you
So far, I’ve only found it really useful for two things. One is generating text, where I’ve found using an LLM to generate a title based on a given piece of text is more effective than using other summarisation models, especially for a short piece of text.
I’ve also found it okay for basic, generic scripts, like trying to figure out what the equivalent Powershell commands for a bash script would be to do something quick, rather than try and learn it from scratch.
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
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.
1 Get random error or have other tech issue
2 Certainly private search engines will be able to find a solution (they cannot)
3 Certainly non private search engines can find the solution (they can not)
4 “Chat GPT, the heck is this [error code or something]” Then usually I get a correct and well explained answer.
I would post to Stack Overflow but I’ll just get my question closed as a duplicate and downvoted because someone asked a different question but supposedly an answer there answers my question.
Guitar amp and pedal modeling.
I’ve been learning docker over the last few weeks and it’s been very helpful for writing and debugging docker-compose configs. My server how has 9 different services running on it.
I use it for python development sometimes, maybe once per day. I’ll paste in a chunk of code and describe how I want it altered or fixed and that usually goes pretty well. Or if I need a generic function that I know will have been coded a million times before I’ll just ask ChatGPT for it.
It’s far from “useless” and has made me somewhat more productive. I can’t see it replacing anyone’s job though, more of a supplemental tool that increases output.
I’ve definitely run into this as well in my own self-hosting journey. When you’re learning it’s easier to get it to just draft up a config - then learn what the options mean after the fact then it is to RTFM from the beginning.
i use it to autoblog about my love for the capitalist hellscape that is our green earth on linkedin dot com
For me, I use Whisper for transcribing/translating audio data. This has helped me to double check claims about a video’s translation (there’s a lot of disinformation going around for topics involving certain countries at war).
Nvidia’s DLSS for gaming.
Different diffusion models for creating quick visual recaps of previous D&D sessions.
Tesseract OCR to quickly copy out text from an image (although I’m currently looking for a better one since this one is a bit older and, while it gets the text mostly right, there’s still a decent amount that it gets wrong).
LLMs for brainstorming or in the place of some stack overflow questions when picking up a new programming language.
I also saw an interesting use case from a redditor:
I had about 80 VHS family home videos that I had converted to digital
I then ran the 1-4 hour videos through WhisperAI Large-v3 transcription and pasted those transcripts into a prompt which had a little bit of background information on my family like where we live and names of everyone who might show up in the videos, and then gave the prompt some examples of how I wanted the file names to look, for example:
1996 Summer - Jane’s birthday party - Joe’s Soccer game - Alaska cruise - Lanikai Beach
And then had Claude write me titles for all the home videos and give me a little word doc to put in each folder which catalogues all the events in each video. It came out so good I have been considering this as a side business
Cooking. So much SEO filler is avoided. You can’t rely on it though, it’s tried to sub sugar for brown sugar. You still need to understand basic flavor concepts.
It’s perfect for topics you have professional knowledge of but don’t have perfect recall for. It can bring forward the context you need to be refreshed on but you can fact check it because you are an expert in that field.
If you need boilerplate code for a project but don’t remember a specific library or built in function that tackles your problem, you can use AI to generate an example you can then fix to make it run the way you wanted.
Same thing with finding config examples for a program that isn’t well documented but you are familiar with.
Sorry all my examples are tech nerd stuff because I’m just another tech nerd on lemmy
On the inverse I’ve found it to be quite bad at that. I can generally count on the AI answer to be wrong, fundamentally.
Might depend on your industry. It’s garbage at g code.
It probably depends how many good examples it has to pull together from stack overflow etc. it’s usually fine writing python, JavaScript, or powershell but I’d say if you have any level of specific needs it will just hallucinate a fake module or library that is a couple words from your prompt put into a function name but it’s usually good enough for me to get started to either write my own code or gives me enough context that I can google what the actual module is and find some real documentation. Useful to subject matter experts if there is enough training data would be my new qualifier.
When I need to make a joke about how inept AI is, I’ll use AI to capture an example of it saying the most efficient way to get to the moon is to put a 2 liter bottle of coke in your asshole, wide end first, remove the cap and immediately sit on an opened sleeve of mentos.
There is one thing I would find genuinely useful that seems within its current capabilities. I’d like to be able to give an AI a summary of my current knowledge on a subject, along with a batch of papers or articles, and have it give me one or more of the following:
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A summary of the papers omitting the stuff I already know
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A summary of any prerequisite background info I don’t already know, but isn’t in the papers
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A summary of all the points on which the papers are in agreement
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A summary of any points where the papers are in contention.
This is indeed very much possible. Just try it.
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Be cautious about the results when using them for googling and summarizing. I had them tell misinformation to me more than once. You’ll “learn” things that are counter-factual.
Translating is a very good use case. I also use them for that an it works very well. Better than any Google Translate. And I use it for roleplay, like a D&D campaign, just not with your friends, but alone and the AI narrates the story. And one-off things where I need some ideas to spark my creativity.
What I’ve tried apart from that are programming, re-phrasing my emails, … But I’ve never got any good results for that. Everytime I did that, I ended up not liking the result, deleting it and starting over and doing it myself.
