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?
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If you already kinda know programming and are learning a new language or framework it can be useful. You can ask it “Give me an if statement in Tcl” or whatever and it will spit something out you can paste in and see if it works.
But remember that AI are like the fae: Do not trust them, and do not eat anything offered to you.
It is sometimes good at building SQL code examples, but almost always needs fine-tuning since it doesn’t know the schema specifics.
Having said that one time it gave me code that resulted in an error, then I went back to GPT and said “This code you gave me is giving this error, can you fix it?” and all it would do is say something like “Correct, that code is wrong and will give an error.”
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.
AI is really good as a starting point for literally any document, report, or email that you have to write. Put in as detailed of a prompt as you can, describing content, style, and length and cut out 2/3 or more of your work. You’ll need to edit it - somewhat heavily, probably - but it gives you the structure and baseline.
This is my one of 2 use cases for AI. I only recently found out after a life of being told I’m terrible at writing, that I’m actually really good at technical writing. Things like guides, manuals, etc that are quite literal and don’t have any soul or personality. This means I’m awful at writing things directed at people like emails and such. So AI gives me a platform where I can enter in exactly what I want to say and tell it to rewrite it in a specific tone or level of professionalism and it works pretty great. I usually have to edit what it gave me so it flows better or remove inaccurate language, but my emails sound so much better now! It’s also helped me put more personality into my resume and portfolio. So who knows, maybe it’ll help me get a better job?
Yeah, I’m really bad at structuring my writing and coming up with ways to phrase some things, especially when starting with a blank page. Having an existing base to work off of and edit helps me immensely.
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.
I couldn’t let an AI do any of this for me.
As in… I couldn’t let anyone make my emails more professional or whatever.
It’s not like I think my emails are always the best and can not be improved upon, it’s just that my emails are “me”.
I never have cause to write an email in a foreign language.
To each their own ¯\(ツ)/¯
Good for softening language in professional environment.
Can you give me some vague examples?
It’s obviously confirmation bias but LLM prose always seems so useless.
Basically I want to say like “no the issue is not on our side you need to check your end” gpt would add some niceness and fluff to make it sound better it would say “I hope this finds you well, it seems there may be an issue on your end. Could you please look into this and let me know if there is anything I can do from our side to help resolve this issue? I’m happy to provide any additional information or assistance that may be needed. Thank you for your attention to this matter I look forward to hearing back from you”
Its useless but I find that without the fluff people genuinely think the first message is angry or annoyed when i don’t mean for the message to be anything like that.
Does anyone actually have jobs writing emails like that all day though?
Ticket systems often have an auto-response like “did you turn it off and on again”.
Most email clients or even gmail have canned response plugins.
IDK. This probably is a great use case and someone doing this might be quicker and better than me using canned responses or whatever… but only incrementally, not by an order of magnitude.
I haven’t seen gmail used in a business setting and I don’t think the auto responses cut it all the time. There is usually a message I want to get across but I don’t want to risk making the other person defensive or upset so I use ai to soften it.
Its good for apologies because I’m usually not sorry for whatever happened and find it hard to pretend.
Loads of people use Google workspace and most email clients have this feature, or if they don’t most people in customer service would just keep a document they can copy & paste from.
Regardless, if an LLM helps you with these tasks then that’s great.
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’m currently using Alpaca with a few LLMs installed, but i really like llama2 uncensored, which is pretty fast and responsive on my system.
Llama 2 is really ancient now.
Try Qwen 2.5, whatever size fits on your system (probably 14B?). Its like night and day compared to llama2, and 34B/72B are like API model smart.
thanks for the recommendation, will try it out over the next few days :-)
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.
Spaced repetition, in particular Anki with FSRS. I don’t think they advertise it as “AI” or even “ML” anywhere, but let’s just say gradient descent over gigantic datasets is involved, all to predict the time when you’re about to forget something so that Anki can prompt you just before that happens. The default predictor is generic, derived from that gigantic dataset, it’s like two handful of tuning parameters, once you’ve gone through enough cards yourself it can be tuned to your mind and habits, in particular, how you use the “hard, good, easy” buttons.
It’s the perfect sledge hammer for the application for the simple reason that we don’t actually understand how memory works so telling the computer “here’s data from millions of med students and language learners, figure out how to predict it” is our best shot. And, indeed, it’s the best-performing algorithm even before you tune it at which point it becomes eerie.
Relatedly, as in “no LLM, no diffusion” Proxima Fusion is using machine learning to crunch through the design space of stellerators to figure out what to prototype in the real world. Actual engineers doing actual engineering.
Then, lastly, yes, playing around with SDXL is fun. Just make sure you can actually judge the images, developing an artistic eye by hitting generate I think is close to impossible. Definitely slower than picking up a pencil, or firing up blender and actually learning how to draw or sculpt.
Regex
I make porn
But I also used it In tech debug, but less and less.
Thank God you made this comment. I thought I was alone.
I use it for porn too. But I joined a site that makes it very easy to do. Super fun, but the initial rush has worn off. Still pretty rewarding, tho.
Guitar amp and pedal modeling.
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
