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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[–] GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee 1 points 7 minutes 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.

[–] jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 5 points 48 minutes ago

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

Make your NPCs and towns and monsters!

[–] Harvey656@lemmy.world 8 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] yrmp@lemmy.world 11 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] shadowfax13@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

i switched to kagi a year ago as i usually need go through search. i was astonished at just how dogpoop google search is compared to it.

youtube was even worse, i had to go through 10 unrelated videos to find one slightly relevant one. kagi is usually dont have the latest results but is on point on relevancy.

[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.world 1 points 18 minutes ago

youtube was even worse, i had to go through 10 unrelated videos to find one slightly relevant one.

Last month I typed letter for letter the title of a video I saw on there in YouTube search and it tried so hard to push some other barely related videos, I couldn't believe it. I ended up typing the url manually like some internet cave man

[–] yrmp@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I looked at kagi but I don’t want to pay for it because I’m a cheap bastard.

[–] Deway@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Searx uses different search engines to get the best results. There are many public instances or if you can self host, you can run it privately.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

It also helps me with German, since it’s good at finding patterns and how German people typically say

Depending on your first language I can offer you my assistance as a native german :)
If you want to, pm me or send a message to my email: lemmy@relay2moritz.mozmail.com

[–] yrmp@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I am moving to Germany next year. Even though I was born there and my mother taught me some, and I learned it in high school, and I also studied in college in the USA, I cannot speak it worth shit. I’m hoping I pick up some more when I move, but if not maybe my kids can teach me.

I find that I’m just trying to pick up things through osmosis. I watch German youtubers and try to watch a German movie or two every now and then. And then sometimes when I’m talking I try to directly translate what I’m saying in my head, and assuming I know the words, I usually fuck up the order, article, or tense.

I say all that to say that my current workflow is already overwhelming and I’m on a bit of a time crunch. I do really need to surround myself with native speakers and listen to them more. I will reach out. Thanks!

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

If you want more recommendation for german yt content, what are some general interests if you?
For example comedic story telling, memes, game/talk shows, technical etc.?

Edit:

And then sometimes when I’m talking I try to directly translate what I’m saying in my head, and assuming I know the words, I usually fuck up the order, article, or tense.

We have two foreign colleagues at work. One being from Syria and one from Russia. Both at the time of starting broke relatively broken German but thwy improved soo much since I met them. One of them did go to a german language school. And even after 6 years some errors are made. Nothing to worry about if you can get the idea across.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

I just tried it and was pleasently surprised.

[–] Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 15 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 11 points 7 hours ago (1 children)
[–] RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 hours ago

Leave the poor witch alone, he wrote it himself.

[–] TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 11 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee 5 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

That's a bit loaded question. By AI I assume you're refering to GenAI/LLMs rather than AI broadly.

  • I use it to correct my spelling on longer posts and I find that it improves the clarity and helps my point come across better.
  • I use Dall-E to create pictures I never could have before, because despite my interest in drawing, I just never bothered to learn it myself. GenAI enables me to skip the learning and go straight to creating.
  • I like that it can simulate famous people and allows me to ask 'them' questions that I never could in real life. For example, yesterday I spent a good while chatting with 'Sam Harris' about the morality of lying and the edge cases where it might be justified. I find discussions like this genuinely enjoyable and insightful.
  • I also like using the voice mode where I can just talk with it. As a non-native english speaker, I find it to be good practise to help me improve my ~~spelling~~ pronunciation.
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[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 7 points 7 hours ago

It’s really helped me get recipes without website ads overtaxing my old surface.

[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 21 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I agree, I don’t really use it but I do like some of the memes that came out of it, case in point:

[–] Fizz 25 points 9 hours ago

Ah fuck I thought that photo was real.

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[–] sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 17 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Delphia@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Ive found its made doing end-runs around enshitification easier.

For example Trying to find a front suspension top for a peugeot 206 gti with google means being recommended everything front suspension for the peugeot 207, 208, Vw Gti, Swift Gti... not to mention the websites "Best price on insert what you searched for here" only they sell nothing.

So I ask chat gpt for the part number and search that.

[–] sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 1 points 52 minutes ago

This is exactly the kind of thing that LLMs are good for. I also use them to get quick and concise answers about programming frameworks, instead of trying to triangulate the answer from various anecdotes on stackoverflow, or reading two hours of documentation.

But I figured this kind of thing doesn't count as "slop." OP was talking about the incoherent trash hallucinations, so I left that one out.

[–] monkeyman512@lemmy.world 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I think people were already making the internet worse. AI just helps them make it worse faster.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 hours ago

I mean, yeah, but that difference is quite crucial.

People have always wanted to be the top search result without putting effort in, because that brings in ad money.
But without putting effort in, their articles were generally short, had typoes, and there were relatively few such articles.

Now, LLMs allow these same people to pump out hundredfold as much gargage, consisting of lengthy articles in many languages. And because LLMs are specifically trained to produce texts that are human-like, it's difficult for search engines to filter out these bad quality results.

[–] CookieMonsterDebate@lemmy.world 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

100%. I don't need help finding what's on your website. I can find that myself. If I'm contacting customer support it's because my problem needs another brain on it, from the inside. Someone who can think and take action to help me. Might require creativity or flexibility. AI has never helped me solve anything.

[–] sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 1 points 50 minutes ago

Oh I hate those chat bots which just display a list of articles matching keywords in your question.

[–] wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 71 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

I created a funny AI voice recording of Ben Shapiro talking about cat girls.

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 29 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Then it was all worth it.

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

ChatGPT is incredibly good at helping you with random programming questions, or just dumping a full ass error text and it telling you exactly what's wrong.

This afternoon I used ChatGPT to figure out what the error preventing me from updating my ESXi server. I just copy pasted the entire error text which was one entire terminal windows worth of shit, and it knew that there was an issue accessing the zip. It wasn't smart enough to figure out "hey dumbass give it a full file path not relative" but eventually I got there. Earlier this morning I used it to write a cross apply instead of using multiple sub select statements. It forgot to update the order by, but that was a simple fix. I use it for all sorts of other things we do at work too. ChatGPT won't replace any programmers, but it will help them be more productive.

[–] PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 6 points 8 hours ago

If used in the specific niche use cases its trained for, as long as its used as a tool and not a final product. For example, using AI to generate background elements of a complete image. The AI elements aren't the focus, and should be things that shouldn't matter, but it might be better to use an AI element rather than doing a bare minimum element by hand. This might be something like a blurred out environment background behind a peice of hand drawn character art - otherwise it might just be a gradient or solid colour because it isn't important, but having something low-quality is better than having effectively nothing.

In a similar case, for multidisciplinary projects where the artists can't realistically work proficiently in every field required, AI assets may be good enough to meet the minimum requirements to at least complete the project. For example, I do a lot of game modding - I'm proficient with programming, game/level design, and 3D modeling, but not good enough to make dozens of textures and sounds that are up to snuff. I might be able to dedicate time to make a couple of most key resources myself or hire someone, but seeing as this is a non-commercial, non-monitized project I can't buy resources regularly. AI can be a good enough solution to get the project out the door.

In the same way, LLM tools can be good if used as a way to "extend" existing works. Its a generally bad idea to rely entirely on them, but if you use it to polish a sentence you wrote, come up with phrasing ideas, or write your long if-chain for you, then it's a way of improving or speeding up your work.

Basically, AI tools as they are, should be seen as another tool by those in or adjacent to the related profession - another tool in the toolbox rather than a way to replace the human.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

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

[–] shadowfax13@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago

you should try kagi. they have had it for more than a year now. it also generates summary for any webpage in the result so as to avoid all the ads and prompts.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 29 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (3 children)

I thought it was pretty fun to play around with making limericks and rap battles with friends, but I haven't found a particularly usefull use case for LLMs.

[–] grubbyweasel@sh.itjust.works 9 points 11 hours ago

I like asking ChatGPT for movie recommendations. Sometimes it makes some shit up but it usually comes through, I've already watched a few flicks I really like that I never would've heard of otherwise

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[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 9 points 10 hours 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.

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 20 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Personally I use it when I can't easily find an answer online. I still keep some skepticism about the answers given until I find other sources to corroborate, but in a pinch it works well.

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

because of the way it's trained on internet data, large models like ChatGPT can actually work pretty well as a sort of first-line search engine. My girlfriend uses it like that all the time especially for obscure stuff in one of her legal classes, it can bring up the right details to point you towards googling the correct document rather than muddling through really shitty library case page searches.

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[–] M0oP0o@mander.xyz 9 points 10 hours ago

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

[–] Dagamant@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago

I think it’s a fun toy that is being misused and forced into a lot of things it isn’t ready for.

I’m doing a lot with AI but it’s pretty much slop. I use self hosted stable diffusion, Ollama, and whisper for a discord bot, code help, writing assistance, and I pay elevenlabs for TTS so I can talk to it. It’s been pretty useful. It’s all running on an old computer with a 3060. Voice chat is a little slow and has its own problems but it’s all been fun to learn.

[–] proti@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

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.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 13 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

AI is used extensively in science to sift through gigantic data sets. Mechanical turk programs like Galaxy Zoo are used to train the algorithm. And scientists can use it to look at everything in more detail.

Apart from that AI is just plain fun to play around with. And with the rapid advancements it will probably keep getting more fun.

Personally I hope to one day have an easy and quick way to sort all the images I have taken over the years. I probably only need a GPU in my server for that one.

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[–] barsquid@lemmy.world 10 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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

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[–] mojolobo@lemmy.jrvs.cc 8 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours 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.

[–] weeeeum@lemmy.world 6 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago

Intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire, understand and use knowledge. Self-driving cars, for example, are intelligent and they run by AI too.

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