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?
Here’s some uses:
- skin cancer diagnoses with llms has a high success rate with a low cost. This is something that was starting to exist with older ai models, but llms do improve the success rate. source
- VLC recently unveiled a new feature of using ai to generate subtitles, i haven’t used it but if it delivers then it’s pretty nice
- for code generation, I agree it’s more harmful than useful for generating full programs or functions, but i find it quite useful as a predictive text generator, it saves a few keystrokes. Not a game changer but nice. It’s also pretty useful at generating test data so long as it’s hard to create but easy (for a human) to validate.
i’ve written bots that filter things for me, or change something to machine-readable formats
the most successful thing i’ve done is have a bot that parses a web page and figures out the date/time in standard format, gets a location if it’s listed in the description and geocodes it, and a few other fields to make an ical for pretty much any page
i think the important thing is that gen ai is good at low risk tasks that reduce but don’t eliminate human effort - changing something from having to do a bunch of data entry to skimming for correctness
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.
I like using it to help get the ball rolling on stuff and organizing my thoughts. Then I do the finer tweaking on my own. Basically I kinda use a sliding scale of the longer it takes me to refine an AI output for smaller and smaller improvements is what determines when I switch to manual.
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.
Making dynamic templates.
I have a very good friend who is brilliant and has slogged away slowly shifting the sometimes-shitty politics of a swing state’s drug and alcohol and youth corrections policies from within. She is amazing, but she has a reading disorder and is a bit neuroatypical. Social niceties and honest emails that don’t piss her bosses or colleagues off are difficult for her. She jumped on ChatGPT to write her emails as soon is it was available, and has never looked back. It’s been a complete game changer for her. She no longer spends hours every week trying to craft emails that strike that just-right balance. She uses that time to do her job, now.
I hope it pluralizes ‘email’ like it does ‘traffic’ and not like ‘failure’.
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.
making roguelike content. Mazes, monsters etc
“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.
Learning how to use Linux
Ha! I use it to write Ansible.
In my case, YAML is a tool of Satan and Ansible is its 2001-era minion of stupid, so when I need to write Ansible I let the robots do that for me and save my sanity.
I understand that will make me less likely to ever learn Ansible, if I use a bot to write the ‘code’ for me; and I consider that to be another benefit as I don’t need to develop a pot habit later, in the hopes of killing the brain cells that record my memory of learning Ansible.
I use it in a lot of tiny ways for photo-editing, Adobe has a lot of integration and 70% of it is junk right now but things like increasing sharpness, cleaning noise, and heal-brush are great with AI generation now.
I recently had to digitize dozens of photos from family scrapbooks, many of which had annoying novelty pattern borders cut out of the edges. Sure, I could have just cropped the photos more to hide the stupid zigzagged missing portions. But I had the beta version of Photoshop installed with the generative fill function, so I tried it. Half the time it was garbage, but the other half it filled in a bit of grass or sky convincingly enough that you couldn’t tell the photo was damaged. +1 acceptable use case for generative AI, I guess.
Fake frames. Nvidia double benefits.
Note: Tis a joke, personally I think DLSS frame generation is cool, as every frame is “fake” anyway.
I generate D&D characters and NPCs with it, but that’s not really a strong argument.
For programming though it’s quite handy. Basically a smarter code completion that takes the already written stuff into account. From machine code through assembly up to higher languages, I think it’s a logical next step to be able to tell the computer, in human language, what you actually are trying to achieve. That doesn’t mean it is taking over while the programmer switches off their brain of course, but it already saved me quite some time.
