Ask Lemmy

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.

Tbh it’s made a pretty significant improvement in my life as a software developer. Yeah, it makes shit up/generates garbage code sometimes, but if you know how to read code, debug, and program in general, it really saves a lot of grunt work and tedious language barriers. It can also be a solid rubber duck for debugging.

Basically any time I just need a little script to take x input and give me y output, or a regex, I’ll have ChatGPT write it for me.

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).

The only things I use and I know they have AI are Spotify recommendations, live captions on videos and DLSS. I don't find generative AI to be interesting, but there's nothing wrong with machine learning itself imo if it's used for things that have purpose.

Do I think it's generally useful? No, not at all.

But for very specific purposes it's worth considering as an option.

Text-to-image generation has been worth it to get a jumping-off point for a sketch, or to get a rough portrait for a D&D character.

Regular old ChatGPT has been good on a couple occasions for humor (again D&D related; I asked it for a "help wanted" ad in the style of newspaper personals and the result was hilariously campy)

In terms of actual problem solving... There have been a couple instances where, when Google or Stack Overflow haven't helped, I've asked it for troubleshooting ideas as a last resort. It did manage to pinpoint the issue once, but usually it just ends up that one of the topics or strategies it floats prove to be useful after further investigation. I would never trust anything factual without verifying, or copy/paste code from it directly though.

To me AI is useless. Its not intelligent, its just a blender that blends up tons of results into one hot steaming mug of "knowledge". If you toss a nugget of shit into a smoothie while it's being blended, it's gonna taste like shit. Considering the amount of misinformation on the internet, everything AI spits out is shit.

It is purely derivative, devoid of any true originality with vague facade of intelligence in an attempt to bypass existing copyright law.

I use ChatGPT and Copilot as search engines, particularly for programming concepts or technical documentation. The way I figure, since these AI companies are scraping the internet to train these models, it’s incredibly likely that they’ve picked up some bit of information that Google and DDG won’t surface because SEO.

Theres someone I sometimes encounter in a discord Im in that makes a hobby of doing stuff with them (from what I gather seeing it, they do more with it that just asking them for a prompt and leaving them at that, at least partly because it doesnt generally give them something theyre happy with initially and they end up having to ask the thing to edit specific bits of it in different ways over and over until it does). I dont really understand what exactly it is this entails, as what they seem to most like making it do is code "shaders" for them that create unrecognizable abstract patterns, but they spend a lot of time talking at length about technical parameters of various models and what they like and dont like about them, so I assume the guy must find something enjoyable in it all. That being said, using it as a sort of strange toy isnt really the most useful use case.

Its really good for all kinds scams.

So...

Low Tier / Wannabe Corpos?

I went for a routine dental cleaning today and my dentist integrated a specialized AI tool to help identify cavities and estimate the progress of decay. Comparing my x-rays between the raw image and the overlay from the AI, we saw a total of 5 cavities. Without the AI, my dentist would have wanted to fill all of them. With the AI, it was narrowed down to 2 that need attention, and the others are early enough that they can be maintained.

I'm all for these types of specialized AIs, and hope to see even further advances in the future.

I love chatgpt, and am dumbfounded at all the AI hate on lemmy. I use it for work. It's not perfect, but helps immensely with snippets of code, as well as learning STEM concepts. Sometimes I've already written some code that I remember vaguely, but it was a long time ago and I need to do it again. The time it would take to either go find my old code, or just research it completely again, is WAY longer than just asking chatgpt. It's extremely helpful, and definitely faster for what I'd already have to do.

I guess it depends on what you use it for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I hope it continues to improve. I hope we get full open source. If I could "teach" it to do certain tasks someday, that would be friggin awesome.

I usually keep abreast of the scene so I'll give a lot of stuff a try. Entertainment wise, making music and images or playing dnd with it is fun but the novelty tends to wear off. Image gen can be useful for personal projects.

Work wise, I mostly use it to do deep dives into things like datasheets and libraries, or doing the boring coding bits. I verify the info and use it in conjunction with regular research but it makes things a lot easier.

Oh, also tts is fun. The actor who played Dumbledore reads me the news and Emma Watson tells me what exercise is next during my workout, although some might frown on using their voices without consent.

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 great at summarization and translations.

I like some of the art. Especially things that would be difficult or almost impossible for a human to do.

One of the more interesting ones is horror. AI is super good at making uncanny or gross stuff that most people wouldn't even think to make.

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 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.

Playing with it on my own computer, locally hosting it and running it offline, has been pretty cool. I find it really impressive when it's something open source and community driven. I also think there are a lot of useful applications for things that are traditionally not solvable with traditional programming.

However a lot of the pushed corporate AI feels not that useful, and there's something about it that really rubs me the wrong way.

I have found ChatGPT to be better than Google for random questions I have, asking for general advice in a whole bunch of things but sido what to go for other sources. I also use it to extrapolate data, come up with scheduling for work (I organise some volunteer shifts) and lots of excel formulae.

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’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 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 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.

duck.ai is very helpful for niche/specific questions I have but can’t find online. It’s also helpful for super quick questions that don’t really warrant a forum post. However, I always take things with a grain of salt.

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.

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

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.