this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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I've found that AI has done literally nothing to improve my life in any way and has really just caused endless frustrations. From the enshitification of journalism to ruining pretty much all tech support and customer service, what is the point of this shit?

I work on the Salesforce platform and now I have their dumbass account managers harassing my team to buy into their stupid AI customer service agents. Really, the only AI highlight that I have seen is the guy that made the tool to spam job applications to combat worthless AI job recruiters and HR tools.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago

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

[–] girsaysdoom 4 points 5 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It helps when writing a lot of boilerplate or if I’m being lazy and want to solve something. However I do not need AI in everything I use. It seems everyone wants AI in their product whilst it’s doing the same thing everyone else is doing.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

A friend's wife "makes" and sells AI slop prints. He had to make a twitter account so he could help her deal with the "harassment". Not sure exactly what she's dealing with, but my friend and I have slightly different ideas of what harassment is and I'm not interested in hearing more about the situation. The prints I've seen look like generic fantasy novel art that you'd see at the checkout line of a grocery store.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

It looks impressive on the surface but if you approach it with any genuine scrutiny it falls apart and you can see that it doesn't know how to draw for shit.

I find it helpful to chat about a topic sometimes as long as it's not based on pure facts, You can talk about your feelings with it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

There are a few uses where it genuinely speeds up editing/insertion into contracts and warns of you of red flags/riders that might open you up to unintended liability. BUT the software is $$$$ and you generally need a law degree before you even need a tool like that. For those that are constantly up to their chins in legal shit, it can be helpful. I'm not, thankfully.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

ChatGPT has mostly replaced tradsearch for me, at least when I'm looking for something that can't be accurately described in 2-3 words

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Erotic Roleplay. You're welcome?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

It's funny you mention this, but the erotic roleplay aspect of llms is a thriving business generating millions of dollars every month now in subscription costs.

We've barely even scratching the surface of what these models can do and they're increasing in usage at an exponential rate.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

I made an AI song for my mom's birthday on Suno and she loved it so much she cried. So that was nice.

I don't like how people are using it to just replace artists. It would be find if it's just to automate some things, like, "AI can tell you when ___ needs to be replaced," but it feels more like it's being used as a stick to workers. Like, "Keep acting up and I'll replace you with dun dun dun AI!"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

it’s useful for programming from time to time. But not for asking open questions. I’ve found having to double check is too unnerving and letting it just provide the links instantly is more my way of working. Other than that it sometimes sketches things out when I have no idea what to do, so all in all it’s a glorified search engine for me.

Other than work I despise writing emails and reports and it fluffs them up. I usually have to edit them afterwards to not make em look ai-made but it adds some „substance“.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Well I use AI to generate Happy Birthday images with the persons name in the greetings.

that's gotta count, right?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

You can whip up a whole album of aggressively mid music just cyberbullying the shit out of one person.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

It's great for parsing through the enshittified journalism. You know the classic recipe blog trope? If you ask chatgpt for a recipe, it just gives you one. Whether it's good or not is a different story, but chatgpt is leagues better at getting to the info you want than search has been for the last decade.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Regardless of how useful some might find it, there isn’t a single use case that justifies the environmental cost (not to mention the societal cost). None. Stop using it. You were able to survive and function without it 2 years ago, and you still can.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (15 children)

This is like saying you can't play video games because it costs electricity and you can go without. You can say it about literally everything that isn't strictly necessary to live. AI isn't just LLMs and only LLMs have a high environmental cost, and unless you are literally wasting the output like the big tech companies are, even that can be justified for the right reasons.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

Then the use of AI advancements in medicine is right out then too? I pretty sure the radiologist that has looked at my MRI this past week looking for lung damage, (thanks long covid!), used it in some form. And my Wife's upcoming mammogram will also use some form of AI to assist in diagnosis. Or the scheduling department for these appointments that used their own type of AI to manage 1000's of appointments per month and year. And this is just one example where AI is quickly becoming indispensable.

AI can be tremendously useful for somethings and useless for other things. Painting with such a large brush like you do makes you no better than those tech bros who push AI for everything to make it all more impressive sounding.

Carp: edit for missed letter

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

I've enjoyed some of the absurd things out can come up with. Surreal videos and memes (every president as a bodybuilder wrestler). However it's never been useful and the cost isn't worth the benefit, to me.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

When it just came out I had AI write fanfiction that no sane person would write, and other silly things. I liked that. That and trail cam photos of the Duolingo mascot.

I think my complaints are more with how capitalism treats new technology, though-- and not just lost jobs and the tool on the climate. Greed and competition is making it worse and worse as a technology that AI itself, within a years span, has been enshittified. There are use cases that it can do a world of good, though, just like everything else bad people ruin.

[–] weker01 7 points 6 days ago

I have horrible spelling and sometimes write in an archaic register. I also often write in a way that sounds rather aggressive which is not my intention most of the time. Ai helps me rewrite that shit and makes me more sensitive to tone in written text.

Of course just like normal spell check and auto completion feature one still needs to read it a final time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

I work on a 20+ year knowledge base for a big company that has had no real content management governance for pretty much that whole time.

We knew there was duplicate content in that database, but were talking about thousands of articles, with several more added daily.

With such a small team, identifying duplicate/redundant content was just an ad-hoc thing that could never be tackled as a whole without a huge amount of resources.

AI was able to comb through everything and find hundreds of articles with duplicate/redundant content within a few hours. Now we have a list of articles we can work through and clean up.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

My primary use of AI is for programming and debugging. It's a great way to get boilerplate code blocks, bootstrap scripts, one-liner shell commands, creating regular expressions etc. More often than not, I've also learned new things because it ends up using something new that I didn't know about, or approaches I didn't know were possible.

I also find it's a good tool to learn about new things or topics. It's very flexible in giving you a high level summary, and then digging deeper into the specifics of something that might interest you. Summarizing articles, and long posts is also helpful.

Of course, it's not always accurate, and it doesn't always work. But for me, it works more often than not and I find that valuable.

Like every technology, it will follow the Gartner Hype Cycle. We are definitely in the times of "everything-AI" or AI for everything - but I'm sure things will calm down and people will find it valuable for a number of specific things.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I find ChatGPT useful in getting my server to work (since I'm pretty new with Linux)

Other than that, I check in on how local image models are doing around once every couple of months. I would say you can achieve some cool stuff with it, but not really any unusual stuff.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Its great for documentation like APIs and it really makes a difference

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

You might not know this but there are many out there who hunger for the slop.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

I was really psyched about AI when it first hit my news feed. Now I'm less than impressed. Most generalist AI platforms get things wrong constantly. Having an LLM trained on specific things, like math or science or maybe law, I could see being useful.

We're at the "AI everything" phase instead of the "AI what makes sense" phase.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago

I for one welcome our new overlords. (for the funny only)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

I've been finding it useful for altering recipes to take my wife's allergies into account. I don't use it for much else. And certainly not for anything important.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

I ask it a lot of technical questions that are broad and non-specific. It helps to quickly get a gauge on what is the correct way to implement something.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Even before AI the corps have been following a strategy of understaffing with the idea that software will make up for it and it hasn't. Its beyond the pale the work I have to do now for almost anything I do related to the private sector (work as their customer not as an employee).

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