Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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 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.

It's great at summarization and translations.

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 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.

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 take x input and give me y output, or a regex, I’ll have ChatGPT write it for me.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.