I promise this question is asked in good faith. I do not currently see the point of generative AI and I want to understand why there’s hype. There are ethical concerns but we’ll ignore ethics for the question.
In creative works like writing or art, it feels soulless and poor quality. In programming at best it’s a shortcut to avoid deeper learning, at worst it spits out garbage code that you spend more time debugging than if you had just written it by yourself.
When I see AI ads directed towards individuals the selling point is convenience. But I would feel robbed of the human experience using AI in place of human interaction.
So what’s the point of it all?
My last three usages of it:
- A translation
- Looking up what actors from Mars Attacks had shared work on another movie. I recognized that Pierce Brosnan and John Doe Baker had done Goldeneye and wondered if there were more.
- Name suggestions for a black and white cat - I got some funny suggestions like Oreo and a kick-ass suggestion for Domino
Mike: “You guys watch Joe Don Baker movies?”
“at worst it spits out garbage code that you spend more time debugging than if you had just written it by yourself.”
I’ve not experienced this. Debugging for me is always faster than writing something entirely from scratch.
100% agree with this.
It is so much faster for me to give the ai the api/library documentation than it would be for me to figure out how that api works. Is it a perfect drop-in, finished piece of code? No. But that is not what I ask the ai for. I ask it for a simple example which I can then take, modify, and rework into my own code.
My understanding is that it will eventually used to improve autocorrect, when they get it working properly.
I use it for parsing through legalese or terms and conditions. IT IS NOT PERFECT. I wouldn’t trust it ever over a lawyer. But it’s great for things like “Is there anything here that is extra unusual or weirdly anti-consumer or very bad for privacy?”. I think it’s great for that.
People here are just “it will take jobs it’s inherently evil”. They said the same about Photoshop, and computers before. I think there are evil uses for it sure, but that doesn’t mean that it has no valid usages
Great use for it!
I hate questions like this due to 1 major issue.
A generative ai with “error free” Output, is very differently useful than one that isn’t.
Imagine an ai that would answer any questions objectively and unbiased, would that threaten job? Yeah. Would it be an huge improvement for human kind? Yeah.
Now imagine the same ai with a 10% bs rate, like how would you trust anything from it?
Currently generative ai is very very flawed. That is what we can evaluate and it is obvious. It is mostly useless as it produces mostly slop and consumes far more energy and water than you would expect.
A “better” one would be differently useful but just like killing half of the worlds population would help against climate change, the cost of getting there might not be what we want it to be, and it might not be worth it.
Current market practice, cost and results, lead me to say, it is effectively useless and probably a net negative for human kind. There is no legitimate usage as any usage legitimizes the market practice and cost given the results.
Learning languages is a great use case. I’m learning Mandarin right now, and being able to chat with a bot is really great practice for me. Another use case I’ve found handy is using it as a sounding board. The output it produces can stimulate new ideas in my own head, and it makes it a good exploration tool that let me pull on different threads of thought.
Never used it until recently. Now I use it to vent because I’m a crazy person.
shitposting.
Need some weidly specific imagery about whatever you’re going on about? It got you covered
I need help getting started. I’m not an idea person. I can make anything you come up with but I can’t come up with the ideas on my own.
I’ve used it for an outline and then I rewrite it with my input.
Also, I used it to generate a basic UI for a project once. I struggle with the design part of programming so I generated a UI and then drew over the top of the images to make what I wanted.
I tried to use Figma but when you’re staring at a blank canvas it doesn’t feel any better.
I don’t think these things are worth the cost of AI ( ethically, financially, socially, environmentally, etc). Theoretically I could partner with someone who is good at that stuff or practice till I felt better about it.
making roguelike content. Mazes, monsters etc
AI saves time. There are few use cases for which AI is qualitatively better, perhaps none at all, but there are a great many use cases for which it is much quicker and even at times more efficient.
I’m sure the efficiency argument is one that could be debated, but it makes sense to me in this way: for production-level outputs AI is rarely good enough, but creates really useful efficiency for rapid, imperfect prototyping. If you have 8 different UX ideas for your app which you’d like to test, then you could rapidly build prototype interfaces with AI. Likely once you’ve picked the best one you’ll rewrite it from scratch to make sure it’s robust, but without AI then building the other 7 would use up too many man-hours to make it worthwhile.
I’m sure others will put forward legitimate arguments about how AI will inevitably creep into production environments etc, but logistically then speed and efficiency are undeniably helpful use cases.
As some witty folks have put it, LLMs can’t give you anything truly, interestingly new when all they’re capable of is some weighted average of what’s already there. And I’ll be clear in saying I hate with the force of a tsunami the way AI is being shoved at us by desperate CEOs, and how it’s being used to kill labor, destroy copyright law, increase income inequality, destroy the environment, and increase the power of huge corporations headed by assholes like Altman and Musk. But AI is getting pretty good at that weighted-average-of-what’s-out-there, and a lot of the work done in several industries can benefit from that. For me, one of the great perversities or tragedies of AI is that it could be a targeted, useful tool but, instead, it’s a hammer to further erode freedom. Even the coders, editors, advertisers, educators, etc. using it to do their jobs are participating in a short-term selloff of their profession to their CEOs, shareholders, etc. at the expense of large numbers of their colleagues or potential colleagues who will now never get jobs.
It’s like if someone invented the wheel and Sam Altman immediately patented it and sold it to Raytheon.
I have a friend with numerous mental issues who texts long barely comprehensible messages to update me on how they are doing, like no paragraphs, stream of consciousness style… and so i take those walls of text and tell chat gpt to summarize it for me, and it goes from a mess of words into an update i can actually understand and respond to.
Another use for me is getting quick access to answered id previously have to spend way more time reading and filtering over multiple forums and stack exchanges posts to answer.
Basically they are good at parsing information and reformatting it in a way that works better for me.
art. It’s a new medium, get over it
It’s pretty good at looking up readily available knowledge that doesn’t have a lot of nuance to it. There’s a lot of stuff you can look up but it always comes with a grain of salt.
Home remedies, bunch of baby facts like poop color meaning, recipes and adjustments, programming examples (requires very prompting skills).
Rewriting stuff into business English is another very nice use case. Tell the AI your qualitifations, ask to make a cover letter for “job description” then review. Drafting text and summarising also pretty good.
Adding modifiers to questions like “list of 20 for X” for a brainstorming or “include how scientifically reliable the claim is on scale of 1-10” really help with getting a good answer and some nuance to whatever claims.
It’s touted as the be all end all but in reality the use cases are very specific in my experience.
I use it to re-tone and clarify corporate communications that I have to send out on a regular basis to my clients and internally. It has helped a lot with the amount of time I used to spend copy editing my own work. I have saved myself lots of hours doing something I don’t really like (copy-editing) and more time doing the stuff I do (engineering) because of it.
