• as someone who started a substack recently, having the AI image generator make cover art is a nice convenience as I neither have the time to do it myself or the cash flow to hire someone. I’m not going to use stock images because then I’d get watermarks and The AI gen is slightly more professional seeming.

    There is a youtube channel that uses AI to illustrate it sci/fi fantasy narrative about a multiversal extraplanar setting called “The Archive In-between” which uses a dreamlike retro aesthetic which really fits well with AI generated imagery. Most people who are fans agree this is a FANTASTIC use for AI.

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

  • I used it for generating my profile picture here on Lemmy and don’t see anything wrong with that.

    • Can you give me a step by step how to do that? What did you go to a website said I want a kitten snuggled up and it spit out that photo? Sorry I am really dumb to this phase of humanity and plan on staying that way towards AI.

      • If I recall, I asked Gemini to generate an image of a kitten wrapped in a blanket.

        It initially gave me a photorealistic image, then I asked it to turn that into a drawn image with the background removed, and that gave me what I have now (though I think I cleaned up some stray pixels in the background).

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

    • Comfy ui
    • Anythingllm
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • It’s teeny tiny bit obvious what OP’s world view is.

      I wonder if they keep asking questions like this about the world and getting good answers they might snap out of the cult

  • 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

  • 2 days

    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.

    • We’re working on getting it to fill your pantry and do all your chores.

      • 15 hours

        No, you’re working on getting it to fill your pantry while the rest of the world goes hungry. There’s a difference.

        • How would you know anything about my internal motivations?

          • They weren’t talking about your internal motivations, but about your results. Important difference.

            • That applies to any technological innovations that improve efficiency though. What’s the solution to making things actually benefit everyone? What worries me the most is if it all gets developed in closed labs where the wealthy maintain full control of it and reap all the benefits. I was thinking that if the tech was under our control, it would then at least be beneficial to more people. I don’t find it to be a satisfactory solution, but I haven’t been able to think of anything better in the last five years.

              • I agree in principle with you. Technology in every bodies hand is benefitting everybody, while under control of a few only benefits them.

                But with LLM as they are currently and in my eyes in the near future as well? I’m not seeing it possible for the average person to make their own model with available hardware. Big data centres are needed and they burn a lot of resources for creating a video that turns a cat into a human, help genociders argue why they needed to bomb that school or destroy our education systems while simultaneously destroyingpublic trust in media.

                • When it comes to LLMs and similar generative models, I agree. I’m talking about AI in general though, and reinforcement learning, which is the focus of my work. It’s still very resource intensive and doesn’t work very well, but what technology isn’t in the early stages?

  • 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.

    • Not really trustworthy since they could easily have a company pay to have their products in the results plus there’s alternatives and other considerations depending on your buying preference like locally available if you need something today vs a better price.

  • 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 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)
      • Wrong on both accounts. As with any other source of information, its correctness needs to be validated. And said verification is usually quicker to do than research from scratch, especially with the absolute state of internet search these days.

        • If you’re verifying the output from a big log file anyway, then you wouldn’t need the llm in the first place.

          If you need the llm, then you’re not verifying it yourself.

          That’s not how reading works.

        • I can paste a huge log file and have it summarize where it went wrong

          except you aren’t using it for validation since you didn’t bother to actually read the huge log file… you’re using for answers, not to confirm something you already know.

          huge difference…

          • They almost always point out what they think the issue is in the log. It doesn’t take much effort to take a snippet of the error, ctrl F, and see that it’s been blowing up 500 times. It’s not hard to verify from there if that was the issue. But if it gives you a fix and that fix worked then presumably it was right.

          • Wrong again. You seem to be the one making the assumptions here, as you keep ascribing methods to me.

            But since you absolutely have to know, when the log file is megabytes in size, I don’t read it line by line, as I have better things to do with my time. But an LLM can help narrow down which line to look at more closely and parse away the noise.

            • sure…sure it can, and it’ll do it incorrectly too.l but you wouldn’t know because you didn’t. other to read. you do you, idgaf. ai is dogshit and will just make you stupider at the end of the day so have it.

              • Again with the assumptions. I do verify the results, as previously stated, and it’s on point most of the time.

                Anyway, LLMs are tools like any other invented since sharp rocks, and you seem to be conflating useful applications of said tools for slopgen. Sometimes a fancy autocomplete might actually be what is best for one particular task, even if you’re opposed to its use. And yes, you obviously do gaf, as you keep trying to argue how I should or shouldn’t do things.

                • There’s no point arguing with someone that interprets “I read the logs” as “I don’t read the logs”.