Timing traffic lights. They could look down the road and see when nothing is coming, to let the other direction go, like a traffic cop. It would save time and gas.

I think it's useful for spurring my own creativity in writing because I have a hard time getting started. To be fair to me I pretty much tear the whole thing down and start over but it gives me ideas.

For one thing, they're much better at googling than I am.

This thread has convinced me that LLMs are merely a mild increment in productivity.

The most compelling is that they're good at boilerplate code. IDEs have been improving on that since forever. Although there's a lot of claims in this thread that seem unlikely - gains way beyond even what marketing is claiming.

I work in an email / spreadsheet / report type job. We've always been agile with emerging techs, but LLMs just haven't made a dent.

This might seem offensive, but clients don't pay me to write emails that LLMs could, because anything an LLM could write could be found in a web search. The emails I write are specific to a client's circumstances. There are very few "biolerplate" sentences.

Yes LLMs can be good at updating reports, but we have highly specialised software for generating reports from very carefully considered templates.

I've heard they can be helpful in a "convert this to csv" kind of way, but that's just not a problem I ever encounter. Maybe I'm just used to using spreadsheets to manipulate data so never think to use an LLM.

I've seen low level employees try to use LLMs to help with their emails. It's usually obvious because the emails they write include a lot of extra sentences and often don't directly address the query.

I don't intend this to be offensive, and I suspect that my attitude really just identifies me as a grumpy old man, but I can't really shake the feeling that in email / spreadsheet / report type jobs anyone who can make use of an LLM wasn't or isn't producing much value anyway. This thread has really reinforced that attitude.

It reminds me a lot of block chain tech. 10 years ago it was going to revolutionise data everything. Now there's some niche use cases... "it could be great at recording vehicle transfers if only centralised records had some disadvantages".

r/SubSimGPT2Interactive for the lulz is my #1 use case

i do occasionally ask Copilot programming questions and it gives reasonable answers most of the time.

I use code autocomplete tools in VSCode but often end up turning them off.

Controversial, but Replika actually helped me out during the pandemic when I was in a rough spot. I trained a copyright-safe (theft-free) bot on my own conversations from back then and have been chatting with the me side of that conversation for a little while now. It's like getting to know a long-lost twin brother, which is nice.

Otherwise, i've used small LLMs and classifiers for a wide range of tasks, like sentiment analysis, toxic content detection for moderation bots, AI media detection, summarization... I like using these better than just throwing everything at a huge model like GPT-4o because they're more focused and less computationally costly (hence also better for the environment). I'm working on training some small copyright-safe base models to do certain sequence prediction tasks that come up in the course of my data science work, but they're still a bit too computationally expensive for my clients.

AI is half cooked baked potato right now. Sure it will keep you fed if you can put up with all the hard lumps in there.

It's really good for generating code snippets based on what I want to do (ex. "How do I play audio in a browser using JavaScript?") and debugging small sections of code.

The useless/useful dichotomy is kinda misguided because that judgement will almost always depend on cost and we don’t have a good understanding of actual costs of running these models. I have copilot enabled in my IDE, and it saves me from a few searches here and there and autocompletes stuff that would have taken me some time to type. So not exactly useless, but right now it’s being payed for by VC’s who expect a return on their investment, so what does that look like? Before we know, it’s hard to say whether these things are relevant

I run some TTRPG groups and having AI take in some context and generate the first draft of flavor text for custom encounters is nice. Also for generating background art and player character portraits is an easy win for me.

• to correct/rephrase a sentence or two if my sentence sounds too awkward

• if I'm having trouble making an excel formula

Well "AI" is a broad category. Usually used to refer to GenAI, so:

• Creating quick stand-in art for a game before I've got proper sprites for it (not because "muh art theft", just because the AI art I've generated does not look very good to me)

• Summarising articles, like you said so I can decide if I want to read them in full

• Formatting text I've copied from pdfs

• More complex searches that require comprehension of grammar and natural language syntax. Any answer I get to these I then fact check using search terms a classical search engine can understand.

I read a paper a while back that found that people who used AI assistants for coding, who only used the assistants to generate small functions where the prompt already included the function declaration and the programmer already knew how the function should be written but just wanted to save time, in these cases the use of an AI assistant did not negatively impact the "correctness" of the produced code. So I guess I might one day use an AI coding assistant like that, but thus far I've never felt the need to use AI-generated code.

Idk if it counts as GenAI but I use Waifu2x to remove jpg artifacts and upscale textures to a useable state.

New question: does anyone NOT IN TECH have a use case for AI?

This whole thread is 90% programming, 9% other tech shit, and like 2 or 3 normal people uses

I used it to write a GUI frontend for yt-dlp in python so I can rip MP3s from YouTube videos in two clicks to listen to them on my phone while I'm running with no signal, instead of hand-crafting and running yt-dlp commands in CMD.

Also does HD video rips with audio encoding, if I want.

It took us about a day to make a fully polished product over 9 iterative versions.

It would have taken me a couple weeks to write it myself (and therefore I would not have done so, as I am supremely lazy)

I take pictures of my recipe books and ask ChatGPT to scan and convert them to the schema.org recipe format so I can import them into my Nextcloud cookbook.

I mainly use it if I want to rephrase text passages and to correct the grammar and spelling of texts. However, I only use it when writing important assignemts for choop/university.

Sometimes it's helpful if I'm having trouble making a specific excel formula

I use it for generating illustrations and NPCs for my TTRPG campaign, at which it excels. I'm not going to pay out the nose for an image that will be referenced for an hour or two.

I also use it for first drafts (resume, emails, stuff like that) as well as brainstorming and basic Google tier questions. Great jumping off point.

An iterative approach works best for me, refining results until they match what I'm looking for, then manually refining further until I'm happy with the results.

I use it to ask questions that I can't find search results for or don't have the words to ask. Also for d&d character art I share with my playgroup lol.

Spaced repetition, in particular Anki with FSRS. I don't think they advertise it as "AI" or even "ML" anywhere, but let's just say gradient descent over gigantic datasets is involved, all to predict the time when you're about to forget something so that Anki can prompt you just before that happens. The default predictor is generic, derived from that gigantic dataset, it's like two handful of tuning parameters, once you've gone through enough cards yourself it can be tuned to your mind and habits, in particular, how you use the "hard, good, easy" buttons.

It's the perfect sledge hammer for the application for the simple reason that we don't actually understand how memory works so telling the computer "here's data from millions of med students and language learners, figure out how to predict it" is our best shot. And, indeed, it's the best-performing algorithm even before you tune it at which point it becomes eerie.

Relatedly, as in "no LLM, no diffusion" Proxima Fusion is using machine learning to crunch through the design space of stellerators to figure out what to prototype in the real world. Actual engineers doing actual engineering.

Then, lastly, yes, playing around with SDXL is fun. Just make sure you can actually judge the images, developing an artistic eye by hitting generate I think is close to impossible. Definitely slower than picking up a pencil, or firing up blender and actually learning how to draw or sculpt.

Good for softening language in professional environment.

It’s perfect for topics you have professional knowledge of but don’t have perfect recall for. It can bring forward the context you need to be refreshed on but you can fact check it because you are an expert in that field.

If you need boilerplate code for a project but don’t remember a specific library or built in function that tackles your problem, you can use AI to generate an example you can then fix to make it run the way you wanted.

Same thing with finding config examples for a program that isn’t well documented but you are familiar with.

Sorry all my examples are tech nerd stuff because I’m just another tech nerd on lemmy

I use it like an intern/other team member since the non-profit I work for doesn't have any money to hire more people. Things like:

• Taking transcripts of meetings and turning them into neat and ordered meeting minutes/summaries, or pulling out any key actions/next steps
• Putting together objectives and agendas for meetings based on some loose info and ideas I give it
• Summarise the key points from articles/long documents I don't have tome or patience to read through fully.
• Making my emails sound more professional/nicer/make up for my brainfarts
• Giving me ideas on how to format/word slides and documents depending on what tone I want to employ - is it meant for leadership? Other team members?
• Make my writing more organised/better structured/more professional sounding
• Writing emails in foreign languages with a professional tone. Caveat is I'm fluent enough in those languages to know if the output sounds right. Before AI I would rely on google translate (meh), dictionaries, language forums, etc and it would take me HOURS to write a simple email using the correct terminology. Also helpful to check grammar and sentence structure in ways that aren't always picked up by Word.
• I sound more like a robot than an actual robot, so I ask the robot to reword my emails/messages to sound more "human" when the need arises (like a colleague is leaving, had a baby, etc).
• Bouncing off ideas. This doesn't always work and I know it doesn't actually have an opinion, but it helps get the ball rolling, especially if I'm struggling with procrastination.
• If my sentences are too long for a document, I ask it to shorten/reword and it's pretty capable of doing that without losing too much of the essence of what I want to get across

Of course I don't just take whatever it spits out and paste it. I read through everything, make sure it still sounds more or less like "me". Sometimes it'll take a couple of prompts to get it to go where I want it, and takes a bit of review and editing but it saves me literal hours. It's not necessarily perfect, but it does the job. I get it's not a panacea, and it's not great for the environment, but this tech is literally saving my sanity right now.

AI is really good as a starting point for literally any document, report, or email that you have to write. Put in as detailed of a prompt as you can, describing content, style, and length and cut out 2/3 or more of your work. You'll need to edit it - somewhat heavily, probably - but it gives you the structure and baseline.

I guess it's helpful for identifying people, organisations and products of which to steer well clear (yes i am a hater)

1 Get random error or have other tech issue

2 Certainly private search engines will be able to find a solution (they cannot)

3 Certainly non private search engines can find the solution (they can not)

4 "Chat GPT, the heck is this [error code or something]" Then usually I get a correct and well explained answer.