Ask Lemmy

The only thing I've found them actually useful for is generating random lists for my D&D games.

When it comes down to needing some mundane descriptions, its great having an LLM brainstorm for you. "Give me 10 examples of weird things I might see in jars in a witch's hut." This works well because you can just cut the 5 you don't like and use the other 5 to brainstorm your final list.

I feed it TOS, Service Agreements, etc and have it simplify and summarize them so i can have a general idea of what is in them without 10 minutes of reading.

Brainstorming ideas; it's something to bounce ideas off and see what can be tweaked.

Single-player D&D. Can setup multiple players/characters and a DM and just play D&D by myself, which is rad.

Having conversations with fictional characters. Like Data from Star Trek.

Among other things: Cooking. They're really helpful in those situations where I have a bunch of ingredients lying around in my pantry but I lack concrete recipes that can make a proper meal out of them.

Messing with a win11 laptop recently, I asked copilot how to disable copilot. After a couple of tries it told me.

That's about it.

I mostly just use them to help write Python scripts.

None. I avoid them when ever possible which thus far is most of the time.

Absolutely nothing, because they all give fucking useless results. Hallucinates, is confidently wrong, and isn't even grammatically competent (depending on the model). Not even good for a draft, because I'd have to completely rewrite it anyway.

LLMs are only as good as the guys training it (who are mostly morons), and the raw data they train on (which is mostly unaudited random shit).

And that's just regular language. Coding? Hah!

Me: Generate some code to [do a thing].
LLM: [Gives me code]
Me: [Some part] didnt work.
LLM: Try [this] instead.
Me: That didn't work either.
LLM: Try [the first thing] again.
Me: ... that still doesn't work...
LLM: Oh, sorry. Try [the second thing again].
Me: ...

Loop continues forever.

One time I found out about a built-in function that I didn't know about (in LLM generated code that didn't work), and read the manual for it, and rewrote the code from scratch to get it working. Literally the only useful thing it ever gave me was a single word (that it probably found on Superuser or StackExchange in the first place).

I used openAI/whisper to transcribe several thousand .wav files full of human speech (running locally). Much faster than trying to listen to them myself. It wasn't perfect but the error rate was within acceptable levels.

porn

Instead of reading a manual file for the badrillionth time, I ask it how a shell command should be formated. If it is easy, it gets it right away and I say "oh, yea, that's right". If it is hard, I still get a starting point and can correct it fairly quickly. I ask it for translations when learning a new language, which I've been doing lately. This it excel at. Even languages that conventional machine translation fails at. I asked chatgpt for Minecraft blocks with some specific set of desirable redstone properties that I didn't want to dig through a wiki to find. This one had varying success. It is not aware of every odd redstone secret, but it can spit out something useful if you are lucky. I had a quick poem made for one of my rp characters. We had a 5 minute break and I wanted something that made sense for the next scene. Some quick directions to the LLM and a little shoveling paragraphs around and there you go.

I also have tried some light rp with the ai for entertainment. I tried merging harry potter and star trek once. It was mildly entertaining.

If you know how they are dumb and where they kinda work, you can get stuff done. Especially if the answers are easily verifiable. That about summs up how I use them.

Nothing. Remember that bartender from the original Star Wars?

Friend, code, search engine, writing, cooking ideas, sexy time, exploring psychology, therapist, etc.

I use Chatgpt 3.5 both personally and at work for tip of the tongue questions, especially when I can't think of a word. Sometimes as a starting point when I have trouble finding the answer to a question in Google. It can sometimes find an old movie that I vaguely remember based on my very poor descriptions too.

For example: "what is the word for a sample of a species which is used to define the species" - tip of the tongue, holotype. "What is the block size for LTO-9 tape" - wasn't getting a clear answer from forums and IBM documentation is kind of behind a wall, needed Chatgpt to realize there was no single block size for tape.

It's excellent for difficult to search things that can be quickly verified once you have an answer (important step, as it will give you garbage rather than say it doesn't know something).

Nothing. Never used.

I occasionally use LLMs to generate a set of characters for a TTRPG, if I don't have the time to prepare and/or know we'll play a very limited scenario in terms of who my PCs are able to meet. This is especially true for oneshots where I just don't want to put too much work in.

I recently built a scenario for a cthulhu themed scenario, that was set in a 1920s Louisiana prison and planned for two to three sessions. I just had an LLM do a list of all the prisoners and guards on the PCs block, with a few notes on the NPCs look and character. This drastically reduced the time I had to put in preparing the scenario.

Homework for my 7yo: Please, write a short story, around 300 words. I want a prince named Anna on it, and a unicorn, a castle and a treasure must be mentioned too. At the end, write for questions related to the tale.

Maybe unethical, but I have mine participate in Twitch chats to see if it passes as human and surprisingly it does. People ask it questions and it randomly responds to users with either agreeable or disagreeable responses.

Sometimes I have it re-write emails for me if I feel like my tone is off. Once in a blue moon I'll use an LLM to write a trivial AHK script. I also use AI art bots for throwaway character art for NPCs in my D&D campaign.

Beyond that, almost never.

I use Google Translate and DeepL almost every workday for translation stuff.

ChatGPT I use rarely. When I have trouble wording something, I does provide a good starting point though. For example I had to write a birthday card for a business relationship and it helped me greatly with that.

No need for generation so far. No pics, videos in my line of work and coding it always just produced garbage for me. I'm faster on my own and the usual googling. Is that a GPT 3.5 issue? I don't have a paid plan.

Nothing because it sucks and isn't worth the effort if you have an Internet connection and any knowledge on how to use a search engine.

I use Gemini often for writing thank you notes.

I used ChatGPT this morning to create a Firefox extension for my favorite website (to allow me to speed up audio playback as desired.) just a few minutes’ back-and-forth and it works perfectly. If you’ve got a favorite site with a UI that you r always wanted slightly tweaked, you could try making a browser extension to do that!

Playtesting ttrpg campaigns, mostly. Can be more helpful than just playing it through solo, but LLMs tend to be really fucking uncreative.

I have a GUI to interface with locally-run image generators that I sometimes use when I need art for D&D.

I use it to consume huge quantities of energy because I despise the human race and life on earth.

if I wanted access to a constant stream of confidently-stated misinformation I would simply open Reddit

There's not really any use for them. There are really no tasks they can help a normal person with in their everyday. I guess you could talk to it like it's a person, but that's sad, and is probably unhealthy, and you should probs just talk to a real person instead.

Now if you do some specialized tasks, like programming, but aren't very good, I guess I can see some use for them.

I'm having trouble seeing any uses for them beyond those though.

I find the state of the art models are finally getting good enough they are wonderful for rubber ducking abstract ideas.

Also code generation.

I use LLMs all the time for work and hobbies, but my work and hobbies are well suited for LLM assistance.

Writing boilerplate documents. I do this for work. I hate it. LLMs are very good at it.

Writing boilerplate code. I do not like writing docstrings, making my code more maintainable, enforcing argument types, etc. I do a lot of research code and I need to spend my time testing and debuging. I can feed my spaghetti into an LLM and it will finish out all the boilerplate for me.

I use it all the time to help simplify long excerpts, giving me an introductory gist of what something says.

Lots of stuff but primarily code generation, code explanation, comment generation, and simplification of technical medical documents to plain English.

The only use I have for AIs is to translate from my mother tongue into English, to chat online. I could write directly in English, but it hasn't been worth it for a few years.

Inspiration. Specially when they hallucinate crazy stuff, it makes for good paintings.

I've been using one to write cover letters for job applications. It takes a bit of wrangling to get anything, and then a bit more to get it to actually say things that aren't total bullshit, but I find it less tedious than writing them myself.

I use GPT 4 for checking Physics Problems quickly. It's much better than education forums nowadays where you have to sign up and probably pay a subscription to be able to view questions

I don't.

And it's not really useful for work either, but that's not stopping my employer from blowing tons of money trying to shoehorn it into everything.