Ask Lemmy

For the most part it's not useful, at least not the way people use it most of the time.
It's an engine for producing text that's most like the text it's seen before, or for telling you what text it's seen before is most like the text you just gave it.

When it comes to having a conversation, it can passibly engage in small talk, or present itself as having just skimmed the Wikipedia article on some topic.
This is kinda nifty and I've actually recently found it useful for giving me literally any insignificant mental stimulation to keep me awake while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

Using it to replace thinking or interaction gives you a substandard result.
Using it as a language interface to something else can give better results.

I've seen it used as an interface to a set of data collection interfaces, where all it needed to know how to do was tell the user what things they could ask about, and then convert their responses into inputs for the API, and show them the resulting chart. Since it wasn't doing anything to actually interpret the data, it never came across as "wrong".

I’ve used it to fill in the gaps for DND storyline. I’ll give it a prompt and a couple of story arcs then I’ll tell it to write in a certain style, say a cowardly king or dogmatic paladin. From there it will spit out a story. If I don’t like certain affects, I’ll tell it to rewrite a section with some other detail in mind. It does a fantastic job and saves me some of the guesswork.

I've never had AI code run straight off the bat - generally because if I've resorted to asking an AI, I've already spent an hour googling - but it often gives me a starting point to narrow my search.

There's been a couple of times it's been useful outside of coding/config - for example, finding the name of some legal concepts can be fairly hard with traditional search, if you don't know the surrounding terminology.

For the most part, it's worthless garbage.

I have a custom agent that i ask questions to that then goes and finds sources then answers my question. Can do math by writing python code and using the result. I uae it almost exclusively instead of regular search. Ai makes coding far quicker giving examples remeber shit i cant remeber how to use writing basic functions etc.

Writing emails. Making profile pictures.

I used to enjoy the tldr bot on lemmy till some fascist decided to kill it instead of just letting people block it.

I have had fun with ChatGPT, but in terms of integrating it into my workflow: no. It just gives me too much garbage on a regular basis for me not to have to check and recheck anything it produces, so it's more efficient to do it myself.

And as entertainment, it's more expensive than e.g. a game, over time.

ChatGPT can be useful or fun every now and then but besides that no.

Only one I ever use is the meta AI built into messenger because my friends and I can have it make silly and often extremely cursed pictures that make us laugh

It's an overly broad term, and the "hype" use-cases dominate the discussion in a way that lacks vision. I'm using machine learning to optimize hardware accelerated processing for particle physics. So, ya, it's not all slop. And what is, may very well evolve.

It stimulates my brain, and I enjoy the randomness of it all. It's like how in nature things can be perfectly imperfect - random and still beautiful - unintentional and still emotion-inducing. Sure, I see the ethical issues with how an AI is trained and how capitalism cares more about profit than people leading to job loss or exploitation; however, those are separate issues in my mind, and I can still find joy in the random output of an AI. I could easily tunnel on the bad parts of AI and what's happening as the world devours a new technology, but I still see benefits it can bring in the medical research and engineering fields.

I use AI every day. I think it's an amazing tool. It helps me with work, with video games, with general information, with my dog, and with a whole lot of other things. Obviously verify the claims if it's an important matter, but it'll still save you a lot of time. Prompting AI with useful queries is a skill set that everyone should be developing right now. Like it or not, AI is here and it's going to impact everyone.

I like messing with the locally hosted AI available. We have a locally hosted LLM trained on our command media at work that is occasionally useful. I avoid it otherwise if I didn't set it up myself or know who did.

I've found AI to be incredibly helpful for me.

I’m not impressed with the LLMs. They do make great synonym generators.

Stable diffusion and other image diffusers are genuinely amazing. And I’m not talking about asking copilot to make Fortnite shrek. There are incredibly complex ways in which you can fine tune to tell it how to shape and refine the image. It has and is going to continue to revolutionize graphical art. And once the math shrinks down it’s going to be everywhere.

Going through data and writing letters are the only tasks I've seen AI be useful for. I still wouldn't trust it as far as I could kick it's ass and I'd check it well before submitting for work.

Kitboga has used AI (STT, LLMs, and TTS) to waste the time of Scammers.

There are AI tools being used to develop new cures which will benefit everyone.

There are AI tools being used to help discover new planets.

I use DLSS for gaming.

I run a lot of my own local AI models for various reasons. Whisper - for Audio Transcriptions/Translations.

Different Diffusion Models (SD or Flux) - for some quick visuals to recap a D&D session.

Tesseract OCR - to scan an image and extract any text that it can find (makes it easy to pull out text from any image and make it searchable).

Local LLMs (Llama, Mixtral) for brainstorming ideas, reformatting text, etc. It's great for getting started with certain subjects/topics, as long as I verify everything that it says.

For fun I'll probably setup GLaDOS like what was done here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1csnexs/local_glados_now_running_on_windows_11_rtx_2060/

You know those people who have no creative skills or drive, but want to be thought of as a creative?

You know those people who have this really neat idea for an app, but they don't plan on making it themself because they're "just an ideas guy"?

You know those people who will offer to pay in exposure? I mean, do you really need to be paid just to draw some pictures anyway?

You know those guys who send you a picture they got from google images and claim this to be a girl they know?

That's the vast majority of the AI audience. I could probably sum that up with the word "parasite", but I wanted to be thorough.

It's basically to replace their shitty chat bots. It's ok, I'm doing the course for it now. You guys hiring?

Google's ai summary is a godsend for certain types of queries and is generally useful

I don't like commercial "AI" period.

That said, I did find some use for chatGPT last year. I had it explain to me some parts of Hawking's paper on black hole particle creation, this was only useful for this one case because Hawking had a habit of stating something is true without explaining it and often without providing useful references. For the record, chatGPT was not good at this task, but with enough prodding and steering I was eventually able to get it to explain some concepts well enough for my usage. I just needed to understand a topic, I definitely wasn't asking chatGPT to do any writing for me, most of what it spits out is flat out wrong.

I once spent a day trying to get it to solve a really basic QM problem, and it couldn't even keep the maths consistent from one line to another.