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?
There is no “artificial intelligence” so there are no use cases. None of the examples in this thread show any actual intelligence. As usual, it’s a variety of disparate tech loosely connected by using statistics on “big data”. Personally this family of technologies hasn’t been very useful for me, apart from the occasionally helpful summary of the top results in a search.
I use it like an intern/other team member since the non-profit I work for doesn’t have any money to hire more people. Things like:
- Taking transcripts of meetings and turning them into neat and ordered meeting minutes/summaries, or pulling out any key actions/next steps
- Putting together objectives and agendas for meetings based on some loose info and ideas I give it
- Summarise the key points from articles/long documents I don’t have tome or patience to read through fully.
- Making my emails sound more professional/nicer/make up for my brainfarts
- Giving me ideas on how to format/word slides and documents depending on what tone I want to employ - is it meant for leadership? Other team members?
- Make my writing more organised/better structured/more professional sounding
- Writing emails in foreign languages with a professional tone. Caveat is I’m fluent enough in those languages to know if the output sounds right. Before AI I would rely on google translate (meh), dictionaries, language forums, etc and it would take me HOURS to write a simple email using the correct terminology. Also helpful to check grammar and sentence structure in ways that aren’t always picked up by Word.
- I sound more like a robot than an actual robot, so I ask the robot to reword my emails/messages to sound more “human” when the need arises (like a colleague is leaving, had a baby, etc).
- Bouncing off ideas. This doesn’t always work and I know it doesn’t actually have an opinion, but it helps get the ball rolling, especially if I’m struggling with procrastination.
- If my sentences are too long for a document, I ask it to shorten/reword and it’s pretty capable of doing that without losing too much of the essence of what I want to get across
Of course I don’t just take whatever it spits out and paste it. I read through everything, make sure it still sounds more or less like “me”. Sometimes it’ll take a couple of prompts to get it to go where I want it, and takes a bit of review and editing but it saves me literal hours. It’s not necessarily perfect, but it does the job. I get it’s not a panacea, and it’s not great for the environment, but this tech is literally saving my sanity right now.
Ansible.
I fucking hate YAML, and I hate Ansible ‘programming’ (see “HTML ‘programming’ language” for rage context).
Chatgpt - I’ll use the one in bing or the one in regular-skype - feeds me stuff I can copy/paste/review, and I can get on with my day having lost fewer brain cells to the rage of existing in a world with Ansible fanboys who seem to have forgotten there is NOTHING Ansible does now that we weren’t doing in 2003 … and that the state of the art is 2 generations PAST that glorified mess.
Having used puppet and chef and seen mgmtconfig, I can only applaud RedHat for going with the worst-of-two options and promoting it so hard it appeared viable.
I don’t mean to dunk on Michael. Just, James’ idea was way better and RH still went with Michael’s, and I one day need to know whether the person who had the final say got help.
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
I use it as a working Google and to make goofy pictures of ideas I have/tattoos I want
I switched to Linux a few weeks ago and i’m running a local LLM (which was stupidly easy to do compared to windows) which i ask for tips with regex, bash scripts, common tools to get my system running as i prefer, and translations/definitions. i don’t copy/paste code, but let it explain stuff step by step, consult the man pages for the recommended tools, and then write my own stuff.
i will extend this to coding in the future; i do have a bit of coding experience, but it’s mainly Pascal, which is horrendly outdated. At least i already have enough basic knowledge to know when the internal logic of what the LLM is spitting out is wrong.
Which local LLM do you use?
i use it to autoblog about my love for the capitalist hellscape that is our green earth on linkedin dot com
OP seems to be talking about generative AI rather than AI broadly. Personally I have three main uses for it:
- It has effectively replaced google for me.
- Image generation enables me to create pictures I’ve always wanted to but never had the patience to practise.
- I find myself talking with it more than I talk with my friends. They don’t seem interested in anything I’m but chatGPT atleast pretends to be
Your third point reminded me of a kid recently who committed suicide and his only friend was an AI bot.
(commenting from alt account as lemm.ee is down again)
Don’t worry, I’m relatively satisfied with my life and have no desire in ending it. I’m just in the lonely chapter of my life where I’ve outgrown my old friend group but haven’t yet found the new ones. I don’t consider AI my friend. It’s just something to bounce my esoteric thoughts off.
Software developer here, who works for a tiny company of
27 employees and 2 owners.We use CoPilot in Visual Studio Professional and it’s saved us countless hours due to it learning from your code base. When you make a enterprise software there are a lot of standards and practices that have been honed over time; that means we write the same things over and over and over again, this is a massive time sink and this is where LLMs come in and can do the boring stuff for us so we can actually solve the novel problems that we are paid for. If I write a comment of what I’m about to do it will complete it.
For boiler plate stuff it’s mostly 100% correct, for other things it can be anywhere from 0-100% and even if not complete correct it takes less time to make a slight change than doing it all ourselves.
One of the owners is the smartest person I’ve ever met and also the lead engineer, if he can find it useful then it has its use cases.
We even have a tool based on AI that he built that watches our project. If I create a new model or add a field to a model, it will scaffold a lot of stuff, for instance the Schemas (Mutations and Queries), the Typescript layer that integrates with GraphQL, and basic views. This alone saves us about 45 minutes per model. Sure this could likely be achieved without an LLM, but it’s a useful tool and we have embraced it.
Software developer here, who works for a tiny company of 2 employees and 2 owners.
We use CoPilot
Sorry to hear about your codebase being leaked.
This isn’t something that happens when you’re paying for a premium subscription. Sure they could go against terms and conditions but that would mean lawsuits and such.
Guitar amp and pedal modeling.
Regex
if you know programming then you can have it do basic stuff (or even mid complexity stuff if you do it step by step). Just the other day I directed it to produce a code in js using 3js which does scatter plots. The code did run into a couple issues which it was able to solve itself when pointed by me. There was only one problem it could not solve despite several attempts (having a grid does not move with camera controls) so I had to figure that out myself. It was pretty impressive. Overall an expert in 3js would do that maybe in 10 minutes, it took me a couple hours. If I had to do it via searching online it would probably take me a couple of days since I know nought about js.
I also had it write bash scripts a couple of times. It is generally pretty good with writing basic stuff and piecing them together especially if you know programming so you can check it and write intelligible prompts about problems in the code.
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.
I’ve learned more C/C++ programming from the GitHub Copilot plugin than I ever did in my entire 42 year life. I’m not a professional, though, just a hobbyist. I used to struggle through PHP and other languages back in the day but after a year of Copilot I’m now leveraging templates and the C++ STL with ease and feelin’ like a wizard.
Hell maybe I’ll even try Rust.
Any LLM I tried sucks using Rust. The book is great, you learn all of the essentials of Rust and it is also pretty easy to read.
I imagine that’s because Rust is still a relative newcomer to the industry and C/C++ have half a century of code out there.
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.
