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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to correct/rephrase a sentence or two if my sentence sounds too awkward
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if I’m having trouble making an excel formula
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I mainly use it if I want to rephrase text passages and to correct the grammar and spelling of texts. However, I only use it when writing important assignemts for choop/university.
Well “AI” is a broad category. Usually used to refer to GenAI, so:
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Creating quick stand-in art for a game before I’ve got proper sprites for it (not because “muh art theft”, just because the AI art I’ve generated does not look very good to me)
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Summarising articles, like you said so I can decide if I want to read them in full
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Formatting text I’ve copied from pdfs
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More complex searches that require comprehension of grammar and natural language syntax. Any answer I get to these I then fact check using search terms a classical search engine can understand.
I read a paper a while back that found that people who used AI assistants for coding, who only used the assistants to generate small functions where the prompt already included the function declaration and the programmer already knew how the function should be written but just wanted to save time, in these cases the use of an AI assistant did not negatively impact the “correctness” of the produced code. So I guess I might one day use an AI coding assistant like that, but thus far I’ve never felt the need to use AI-generated code.
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Idk if it counts as GenAI but I use Waifu2x to remove jpg artifacts and upscale textures to a useable state.
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.
Sometimes it’s helpful if I’m having trouble making a specific excel formula
Do you use the integrated AI in new versions of Excel or do you ask ChatGPT or some other AI to write it out for you?
I use it to ask questions that I can’t find search results for or don’t have the words to ask. Also for d&d character art I share with my playgroup lol.
I used it to write a GUI frontend for yt-dlp in python so I can rip MP3s from YouTube videos in two clicks to listen to them on my phone while I’m running with no signal, instead of hand-crafting and running yt-dlp commands in CMD.
Also does HD video rips with audio encoding, if I want.
It took us about a day to make a fully polished product over 9 iterative versions.
It would have taken me a couple weeks to write it myself (and therefore I would not have done so, as I am supremely lazy)
I guess it’s helpful for identifying people, organisations and products of which to steer well clear (yes i am a hater)
I take pictures of my recipe books and ask ChatGPT to scan and convert them to the schema.org recipe format so I can import them into my Nextcloud cookbook.
Woah cool! Can you share your prompt for that I’d like to try it
I don’t do anything too sophisticated, just something like:
Scan this image of a recipe and format it as JSON that conforms to the schema defined at https://schema.org/Recipe.
Sometimes it puts placeholders in that aren’t valid JSON, so I don’t have it fully automated… But it’s good enough for my needs.
I’ve thought that the various Nextcloud cookbook apps should do this for sites that don’t have the recipe object… But I don’t feel motivated to implement this myself.
I use it for generating illustrations and NPCs for my TTRPG campaign, at which it excels. I’m not going to pay out the nose for an image that will be referenced for an hour or two.
I also use it for first drafts (resume, emails, stuff like that) as well as brainstorming and basic Google tier questions. Great jumping off point.
An iterative approach works best for me, refining results until they match what I’m looking for, then manually refining further until I’m happy with the results.
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.
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.
One use-case for me has been converting code from a language I know to a language I don’t. Usually, just small snippets. The code is usually full of holes, but I’m good enough with the logic to duct tape those puppies!
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.
