Ask Lemmy

I use it all the time, to translate, explain, give guides, write code, do repetitive menial tasks, fix code, understand others code.

I get the hatred for it, but I use it almost every day.

If AI is for anything it's for DnD campaign art.

Make your NPCs and towns and monsters!

In the sense that a forum I am on has had a huge amount of fun doing very silly things with Godzilla, yes.

https://forums.mst3k.com/t/dall-e-fun-with-an-ai/24697/8237

It's best to start at the bottom. We didn't start out with Godzilla when the thread began and it also began in 2022.

8220 posts, the majority Godzilla-related. I haven't done too many lately, but here's a few recent ones:

Yes:

• Demystifying obscure or non-existent documentation
• Basic error checking my configs/code: input error, ask what the cause is, double check it's work. In hour 6 of late night homelab fixing this can save my life
• I use it to create concepts of art I later commission. Most recently I used it to concept an entirely new avatar and I'm having a pro make it in their style for pay
• DnD/Cyberpunk character art generation, this person does not exist website basically
• duplicate checking / spot-the-diffetences, like pastebins "differences" feature because the MMO I play released prelim as well as full patch notes and I like to read the differences

There's a handful of actual good use-cases. For example, Spotify has a new playlist generator that's actually pretty good. You give it a bunch of terms and it creates a playlist of songs from those terms. It's just crunching a bunch of data to analyze similarities with words. That's what it's made for.

It's not intelligence. It's a data crunching tool to find correlations. Anyone treating it like intelligence will create nothing more than garbage.

An LLM (large language model, a.k.a. an AI whose output is natural language text based on a natural language text prompt) is useful for the tasks when you're okay with 90% accuracy generated at 10% of the cost and 1,000% faster. And where the output will solely be used in-house by yourself and not served to other people. For example, if your goal is to generate an abstract for a paper you've written, AI might be the way to go since it turns a writing problem into a proofreading problem.

The Google Search LLM which summarises search results is good enough for most purposes. I wouldn't rely on it for in-depth research but like I said, it's 90% accurate and 1,000% faster. You just have to be mindful of this limitation.

I don't personally like interacting with customer service LLMs because they can only serve up help articles from the company's help pages, but they are still remarkably good at that task. I don't need help pages because the reason I'm contacting customer service to begin with is because I couldn't find the solution using the help pages. It doesn't help me, but it will no doubt help plenty of other people whose first instinct is not to read the f***ing manual. Of course, I'm not going to pretend customer service LLMs are perfect. In fact, the most common problem with them seems to be that they go "off the script" and hallucinate solutions that obviously don't work, or pretend that they've scheduled a callback with a human when you request it, but they actually haven't. This is a really common problem with any sort of LLM.

At the same time, if you try to serve content generated by an LLM and then present it as anything of higher quality than it actually is, customers immediately detest it. Most LLM writing is of pretty low quality anyway and sounds formulaic, because to an extent, it was generated by a formula.

Consumers don't like being tricked, and especially when it comes to creative content, I think that most people appreciate the human effort that goes into creating it. In that sense, serving AI content is synonymous with a lack of effort and laziness on the part of whoever decided to put that AI there.

But yeah, for a specific subset of limited use cases, LLMs can indeed be a good tool. They aren't good enough to replace humans, but they can certainly help humans and reduce the amount of human workload needed.

I like being able to generate porn.

Not that I can’t just, you know, FIND porn, but there’s something really fun about trying to generate an image just right, tweaking settings and models until you get the result you’re after.

/shrug

It tends to make Lemmy people mad for some reason, but I find GitHub copilot to be helpful.

Depends on what you mean by "like" lol

It's nice to generate images of settings for my d&d campaign.
It's nice that I can replace Google/Siri with something I run and control locally, for controlling my home.

But those aren't really important things

To me it's glorified autocomplete. I see LLM as a potencial way of drastically lowering barrier of entry to coding. But I'm at a skill level that coercing a chatbot into writing code is a hiderance. What I need is good documentation and good IDE statical analysis.

I'm still waiting on a good, IDE integrated, local model that would be capable of more that autompleting a line of code. I want it to generate the boiler plate parts of code and get out of my way of solving problems.

What I don't want, is a fucking chatbot.

I have a local instance of Stable Diffusion that I use to make art for MtG proxies. Prior to AI my art was limited to geometric designs and edits of existing pieces. Integrating AI into my work flow has expanded my abilities greatly, and my art experience means that I can do more with it than just prompt engineering.

I used it the other day to spit out a ~150 line python script. It worked flawlessly on the first try.

I don’t know python.

I use LLMs for multiple things, and it's useful for things that are easy to validate. E.g. when you're trying to find or learn about something, but don't know the right terminology or keywords to put into a search engine. I also use it for some coding tasks. It works OK for getting customized usage examples for libraries, languages, and frameworks you may not be familiar with (but will sometimes use old APIs or just hallucinate APIs that don't exist). It works OK for things like "translation" tasks; such as converting a MySQL query to a PostGres query. I tried out GitHub CoPilot for a while, but found that it would sometimes introduce subtle bugs that I would initially overlook, so I don't use it anymore. I've had to create some graphics, and am not at all an artist, but was able to use transmission1111, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Gimp to get usable results (an artist would obviously be much better though). RemBG and works pretty well for isolating the subject of an image and removing the background too. Image upsampling, DLSS, DTS Neural X, plant identification apps, the blind-spot warnings in my car, image stabilization, and stuff like that are pretty useful too.

to copy my own comment from another similar thread:

I’m an idiot with no marketable skills. I put boxes on shelves for a living. I want to be an artist, a musician, a programmer, an author. I am so bad at all of these, and between having a full time job, a significant other, and several neglected hobbies, I don’t have time to learn to get better at something I suck at. So I cheat. If I want art done, I could commission a real artist, or for the cost of one image I could pay for dalle and have as many images as I want (sure, none of them will be quite what I want but they’ll all be at least good). I could hire a programmer, or I could have chatgpt whip up a script for me since I’m already paying for it anyway since I want access to dalle for my art stuff. Since I have chatgpt anyway, I might as well use it to help flesh out my lore for the book I’ll never write. I haven’t found a good solution for music.

I have in my brain a vision for a thing that is so fucking cool (to me), and nobody else can see it. I need to get it out of my brain, and the only way to do that is to actualize it into reality. I don’t have the skills necessary to do it myself, and I don’t have the money to convince anyone else to help me do it. generative AI is the only way I’m going to be able to make this work. Sure, I wish that the creators of the content that were stolen from to train the ai’s were fairly compensated. I’d be ok with my chatgpt subscription cost going up a few dollars if that meant real living artists got paid, I’m poor but I’m not broke.

These are the opinions of an idiot with no marketable skills.

I hate that it monetized general knowledge that use to be easily searchable then repackaged it as some sort of black box randomizer.

Good for rephrasing things when I'm having trouble.

I got high and put in prompts to see what insane videos it would make. That was fun. I even made some YouTube videos from it. I also saw some cool & spooky short videos that are basically "liminal" since it's such an inhuman construction.

But generally, no. It's making the internet worse. And as a customer I definitely never want to deal with an AI instead of a human.

Boilerplate code (the stuff you usually have to copy anyway from GitHub) and summarising long boring articles. That's the use case for me. Other than that I agree - and having done AI service agent coding myself for fun I can seriously say that I would not trust it to run a business service without a human in the loop

I use perplexity.ai more than google now. I still don’t love it and it’s more of a testament to how far google has fallen than the usefulness of AI, but I do find myself using it to get a start on basic searches. It is, dare I say, good at calorie counting and language learning things. Helps calculate calorie to gram ratios and the math is usually correct. It also helps me with German, since it’s good at finding patterns and how German people typically say what I am trying to say, instead of just running it through a translator which may or not have the correct context.

I do miss the days where I could ask AI to talk like Obama while he’s taking a shit during an earthquake. ChatGPT would let you go off the rails when it first came out. That was a lot of fun and I laughed pretty hard at the stupid scenarios I could come up with. I’m probably the reason the guardrails got added.

I use ChatGpt to ask programming questions, it’s not always correct but neither is Stack Overflow nowadays. At least it will point me in the right direction.

I use silly tavern for character conversations, pretty fun. I have SD forge for Pomy diffusion, and use Suno and Udio. Almost all of that goes to DND, the rest for personal recreation. Google and openai all fail to meet my use cases and if I cuss they get mad so fuck em. I never use those for making money or any other personal progression, that would be wrong.

Garbage in; garbage out. Using AI tools is a skillset. I've had great use with LLMs and generative AI both, you just have to use the tools to their strengths.

LLMs are language models. People run into issues when they try to use them for things not language related. Conversely, it's wonderful for other tasks. I use it to tone check things I'm unsure about. Or feed it ideas and let it run with them in ways I don't think to. It doesn't come up with too much groundbreaking or new on its own, but I think of it as kinda a "shuffle" button, taking what I have already largely put together, and messing around with it til it becomes something new.

Generative AI isn't going to make you the next mona Lisa, but it can make some pretty good art. It, once again, requires a human to work with it, though. You can't just tell it to spit out an image and expect 100% quality, 100% of the time. Instead, it's useful to get a basic idea of what you want in place, then take it to another proper photo editor, or inpainting, or some other kind of post processing to refine it. I have some degree of aphantasia - I have a hard time forming and holding detailed mental images. This kind of AI approaches art in a way that finally kinda makes sense for my brain, so it's frustrating seeing it shot down by people who don't actually understand it.

I think no one likes any new fad that's shoved down their throats. AI doesn't belong in everything. We already have a million chocolate chip cookie recipes, and chatgpt doesn't have taste buds. Stop using this stuff for tasks it wasn't meant for (unless it's a novelty "because we could" kind of way) and it becomes a lot more palatable.

It helps make simple code when Im feeling lazy at work and need to get something out the door.

In personal life, I run a local llm server with SillyTavern, and get into some kinky shit that often makes for an intense masturbation session. Sorry not sorry.

Generative AI has been an absolute game changer in my retouching work. Slightly worrying that it'll put me out of work sometime in the future, but for now it's saving me loads of time, handling the boring stuff so I can concentrate on the stuff it can't do.

It's done a lot of bad/annoying things but I'd be lying if I said it hasn't enabled me to completely sidestep the enshittification of Google. You have to be smart about how you use it but at least you don't have to wade through all the SEO slop to find what you want.

And it's good for weird/niche questions. I used it the other day to find a list of meme songs that have very few/simple instruments so that I could find midi files for them that would translate well when going through Rust's in-game instruments. I seriously doubt I'd find a list like that on Google, even without the enshittification.

If you specifically mean LLM/GenAI:

• Some of my friends enjoy fucking around with those character AIs. I never got the appeal, even as an RP nerd, RPing is a social activity to me, and computers aren't people
• I have seen funny memes be made with Image Generators -- And tbqh as long as you're not pretending that being an AI prompter makes you an "artist", by all means go crazy with generating AI images for your furry porn/DnD campaign/whatever
• https://goblin.tools/ is a cool little thing for people as intensely autistic as I am, and it runs off AI stuff.
• Voice Recognition/Dictation technology powered by AI is a lot better than its pre-AI sibling. I've been giving it a shot lately. It helps my arthritis-ridden hands.

If you mean anything that utilizes machine learning ("AI" is a buzzword), then "AI" technology has been used to help scientists and doctors do their jobs better since the mid 90s

I needed instructions on how to downgrade the firmware of my Unifi UDR because they pushed a botched update. I searched for a while and could only find vague references to SSH and upgrading.

They had a “Unifi GPT” bot so I figured what the hell. I asked “how to downgrade udr firmware to stable”. It gave me effective step by step instructions on how to enable SSH, SSH in and what commands to run to do so. Worked like a charm.

So yeah, I think the problem is we’re in the hype era of LLMs. They’re being over applied at lots of things they aren’t good at. But it’s extremism in the other direction to say there aren’t functions they can do well.

They are at least better than your average canned chat/search bot or ill informed CSR at finding an answer to your question. I think they can help with lots of frustrating or opaque computer related tasks, or at least point you in the right direction or surface something you might not be able to find easily otherwise.

They just aren’t going to write programs for you or do your office job for you like execs think they will.

Its funny to fuck around with, in the same way its funny ask a bible bot for Judges 15-16 and watching the bot get autobanned for saying ass.

thats about all it is though, a stupid silly thing to fuck around with.

Shouldnt be a production/human replacement thing.

The image generators have been great for making token art for my dnd campaign. Other than that, no.

There are plenty of uses for it. There are also plenty of bad implementations that don't use it in a way that helps anyone.

We're going through an overhyped period currently but we'll see actual uses in a few years once the dust settles. About 10 years ago, a similar thing happened with AI vision and now everyone has filters they can use on cameras and face detection. We'll reach another plateau until the next tech hype comes about.