For information based things, absolutely.

Something that people don't seem to understand is that there's a difference between AI and GenAI.

And that within GenAI, there's low cost stuff like text and graphics, and high cost like video and audio.

And that with tools developed with GenAI often do not use GenAI when it is run.

AI is super useful and you use it in a bunch of applications already without even realising it. The camera that interprets speed signs and displays them on your dashboard = AI. Spam filters = AI. Google translate = AI.

There are practical uses for it, but realistically it is only advancing the destruction of the planet and disproportionately affecting poor and working class people's livelihoods first, so no there is no good thing.

No, not really. It's a tool for the ultra-wealthy to masturbate with, that's all. "AI" isn't going to pay your bills or fill your pantry. It was never designed to benefit you, the majority of people who built it don't even grasp what challenges you need addressed let alone have solutions. The very nature of the tech is to harm the middle and the poor. It's the ultimate Veblen Good, a tulip trap for the 21st century.

Well in an ideal world it would make everyone more efficient, letting us do more in less time. Thus we would need to work less for the same amount of money. Like switching over to 4 days a week, same amount of hours per day, for the same salary.

But in reality we've already stepped up efficiency a lot and it never works out that way. It just devalues the work, so we need to produce more to get the same salary. We end up working the same or even more for the same amount of money, or even less money. All of the gains go to the people at the top, creating an ultra rich upper class that really should never exist.

However AI has so many more issues that even this best case scenario has huge downsides for everyone, which will hit the middle class and poor people the hardest. It's really bad news across the board.

I think it could help with medical research. But for the average person, it's (incorrect) search results and plagerism machine only.

If a business is using AI agents to make purchases through, like at a drive thru or something, you could theoretically prompt it in a way that it gives you everything you want for free.

I use it for doing tedious work as a programmer.

Note that it's not replacing anyone, it's just making me more efficient.

My recent usage (jargon warning) was to get it to monitor metrics from seven hosts while I scheduled heavy work loads on the hosts to find bottlenecks.

You can use ChatGPT to find the lowest price on a given item you need. That is objectively a good thing, one just has to weigh the ethics of it.

I'd say I've definitely found some use for AI. Mainly programming stuff that's outside of my comfort zone but where I still understand what's happening.

For example I had it make a bash script I can run to terminate all of my VR programs and relaunch them for when SteamVR crashes instead of manually clicking all the tiny Xes and doubleclicking all the icons.

I could have leaned how to do it myself, but I don't really want to spend 2 hours troubleshooting windows bash scripts I won't use again, especially since I still know what's happening in the code, I just couldn't write it myself

I have two practical use cases where I haven't found a better and more time efficient alternatives that LLMs:

1. I can paste a huge log file and have it summarize where it went wrong (and often how to fix it)
2. It can give me a simple introduction to any topic and provide practical examples. (I don't want to learn Javascript, but I still want to understand the broad strokes of how AJAX works)

I'm working on some applications that use LLM's for some features, and everything you run yourself is 100% free:

https://circutforge.tech/

Source: https://git.opensourcesolarpunk.com/

Using local llm on your computer is ok. There are great open source tool out there :

• Comfy ui
• Anythingllm

https://www.fighthealthinsurance.com/

One use would be as a tutor like how it's used for Project NOMAD. However, you could argue it's not a super strong use case as the information could still be researched yourself.

I have found it to be useful when learning a subject like math and I need more practice exercises on a topic when I've run out of them from a book. I also may use it to create quizes for assessing my own understanding of a subject.

I really do think we as individuals should just wholesale throw it in the bin, the only people who should be using it are teams of workers like scientists/medical staff where it can unequivocally have a big benefit which helps everyone and is thus worth it.

But even then usage should go through a vetting process, so it's justified and not going to lead to worse results.