I know its a bit of a hot topic but I’ve always seen people (online anyways) are either a hard yes or absolutely no on using AI. There are many types of “AI” that have already been part of technology before this hype, I’m talking about LLMs specifically (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc…). When this bubble burst its absolutely not going anywhere. I’m wondering if there is case where you’ve personally used it and found it beneficial (not something you’ve read or seen somewhere). The ethics of essentially stealing vast amount of data for training without compensation or enshitification of products with “AI” is a whole other topic but there is absolutely no way that the use of the technology itself is not beneficial somehow. Like everything else divisive the truth is definitely somewhere in the middle. I’ve been using lumo from proton for the last three weeks and its not bad. I’ve personally found it useful in helping me troubleshoot issues, search or just use it to help with applying for jobs:
- its very good at looking past SEO slop plaguing the internet and it just gets me the information I need. I’ve tried alternative search engine (mojeek, startpage, searXNG, DDG, Qwant, etc…) Most of them unfortunately aren’t very good or are just another way to use google or bing.
- I was having some wifi problem on a pc i was setting up and i couldn’t figure out why. i told it exactly what was happening with my computer along with exact specs. It gave gave me some possible reasons and some steps to try and analyze my computer it was very very useful.
- I’ve been applying for so many jobs and it so exhausting to read hundreds of description see one tiny thing in the middle that disqualifies me so I pass it my resume with links and tell it to compare what i say on my resume and what the job is looking for to see if im a fit. When i find a good job i ask rewriting tips to better focus on what will stand out to a recruiter (or an application filtering system to be real).
I guess what I’m trying to say is it cant all be bad.
Regarding the job application, most companies and sites are using shitty AI to rummage through the piles of resumes they receive.
The whole job application process is frankly one of the worst real world use of most technologies, not only AI
I’ve used it to help me set up a home server. I can paste text from log files or ask about something not working and it tells me what the problem is. It gets things wrong a lot, but this is the perfect low risk use for AI…for sending me in the right direction when I have no idea why things aren’t working. When it’s completely wrong, it doesn’t really matter.
The real test for AI is: “does it matter when it is completely wrong”. If the answer is yes, then that’s not a suitable use for AI.
This. I’m a software engineer and I also sometimes use it by providing it a problem and asking it for ideas how to solve them (usually with the addition of “don’t write any code”, I do that myself, thanks). It gives me a few pointers that I can then follow. Sometimes it’s garbage, sometimes it’s quite good.
99% garbage.
If you have ever touched C++ you will know that it has godawful errors and not even chatgpt knows what the fuck is happwning
That’s why I’m not asking it to give me actual code I should use, but keep it high level. If it then says there are patterns x,y and z that could be usable, I can look it up myself and also write the code itself. Using it to actually write the code is mostly garbage, yes. And in any case you still need to have an idea of what you’re doing yourself anyway.
No, I’m not asking it to write code, I’m asking it to interpret the error and point to the actual problem in the code. It just can’t…
It’s got lots of uses:
- driving up fossil fuel revenues
- providing a solid excuse for laying off a bunch of employees
- disciplining labor
- offloading blame for unpopular decisions
- increasing surveillance and nonconsensual data collection
- corporate theft from artists, claiming ‘its just learning data bro’, only to have the output often be 99% identical to the original ‘learning data’
- making fake videos much easier for swift political disinformation campaigns
- LLM voice agents that make scams much easier to perpetuate on the elderly
Inspiration for writing emails, letters, text messages. I always check what the thing wrote though.
My take on it is that it’s just a tool, and as with most tools you can use it in a sensible way that’s positive, although many people choose not to. So as an example, I work in a creative field and I see a lot of people relying on it to do their creative work for them, which I don’t really agree with. What I use it for is kind of like an assistant to handle all the admin crap that usually gets in the way of doing creative stuff. So sometimes you have to write form letters, grant things etc. - basically formal stuff that wouldn’t require any creative thinking if you did it by yourself anyway, but still eats up time and brain power. I just give that stuff to the AI, make sure it sounds vaguely presentable, and send it off. I could also see a use case for it in areas where I’m weaker like marketing my stuff, maybe for at least coming up with an outline strategy of some sort, although I haven’t really tried that out yet.
Essentially, AI will do your creative stuff for you if you let it, or you can just use it to handle the day-to-day piddly crap to free yourself up to do the creative stuff yourself. It’s up to you really.
My take on it is that it’s just a tool, and as with most tools you can use it in a sensible way that’s positive, although many people choose not to.
I mean sure a screwdriver is “just a tool”, and you can use a screwdriver to pick ice; but it’s not the most efficient tool for the job. It was designed for something else entirely, which makes it awkward and finicky to use as an ice pick. This is why so many people use screwdrivers for their intended purpose, rather than manipulating them to fit into a different workflow.
(The intended purpose here is disrupting creative professions, making creative labor cheaper and more efficient in order to maximize capitalists’ profit from it. Not to make artists’ lives easier or increase their effectiveness as laborers and business owners, although yes it can be used that way and, yes, that is arguably a limited side effect of the original intention.)
I see it as a toy. No different from the Slinky or Silly Putty I had as a kid. Just something to play with.
LLMs trained exclusively on documentation and ran locally seem like they’d be nice. Basically the next step in search algorithms. Do note that I am not talking about having an AI summary at the top of every web search page, that’s harmful.
That’s essentially what I do, I don’t have any accounts with ChatGPT or anything, I just run it locally off my laptop. IDK if you get better results with ChatGPT (I’d assume probably) but my local one seems fine for everything I need it for. It’s a little slow too, but who cares?
How do you run it locally? I haven’t ever tried it. I’m curious to.
No, you phrased it right, I haven’t run any LLMs locally at all.
Ah okay. Well if you grab either of those programs I linked to it’s pretty straightforward, you pretty much just choose your model from a list and away you go. You can run them even if you don’t have a great GPU, but they’ll be slower.
I’d love to have an AI assistant that does shit like call service providers and wait in queue and take care of business for me
Creating low-effort images for ideas that don’t warrant effort, like silly jokes.
I self host Deepseek R1 and it’s been pretty helpful with simple Linux troubleshooting, generating bash commands, and even programming troubleshooting. The thinking feature is pretty cool and I do find myself learning stuff from it.
What took it from gimmick to actual nice to have for me is when my jerry rigged home network broke and wouldn’t connect to the internet. Having what is entially an interactive StackOverflow/ServerFault running on a local machine was really helpful.
Running the model locally makes it easier to not overly rely on AI because of the limited token rate.
You self host the full Deepseek R1? What’s your hardware?
Also, you might enjoy !localllama@sh.itjust.works
No I host the 70b version because I’m limited by my RAM.
In short, teaching myself simple stuff.
Solo roleplay. You can make a character and interact. Generate fake conversations etc.
With generative images you can create custom backgrounds, portraits and landscapes instead of having to lookup for them or doing it yourself.
You can also do some interactive story telling that it’s kind of fun.
Generating quick test questions over a certain topic. It’s another use case I’ve seen it being quite good at.
Wow, what a cool idea, I never even considered this. Any other suggestions to this idea to add some fun?
If you want it to go unhinged try to get an uncensored llm. Dans PersonalityEngine by bartowski is my current favorite.
Try aidungeon - it does exactly this.
I had no idea this existed, my mind is blown. Looking it up later today.
Yeah I think dialogue for videogame characters so they don’t all just repeat the exact same thing again and again would be great.
Works in theory for written dialogue anyway. Spoken would be a bit ropey.
There is a Skyrim mod that does this I believe and it’s pretty decent.
Well colour me impressed!
I used it to extract thousands of rows from tables in PDFs and generate enumerations for them in various programming languages. I had to do some pre-processing with the Python script, and review all the output to make sure it didn’t screw up, but it saved me a lot of time.
You know those business books that combine flimsy pop psychology and self help literature with personal development and business goals? Yeah, those books with 300 pages and only one good idea per 100 pages if you’re lucky. Rest of it is just fabricated stories, ideas copied from other books and regurgitation of ideas from the previous chapters to fluff up the page count. Yes, that category!
Well guess what? GPT can generate precisely that level of quality without any effort. In fact, it seems to gravitate towards that style unless you specifically work hard to steer it to aim higher. It has never been easier to become a business book author! Zero editing required. Just prompt and publish.
It feels like this is the one area where GPT truly excels.
For image gen I don’t have a good use but it is very complex which means sometimes I can just lose an hour or 2 fumbling around in a complex network of nodes.
What I found fascinating was how strangely good the results were when I created an image, then fed the result back as input, and repeated that process.
The only useful thing I used image gen for was creating references for an artist to create a PFP for me that looks rad as hell.As for LLMs, also not really. I think about 90% of the time LLMs either give a useless or just wrong answer. I can’t seem to find the thing that LLMs are supposed to be good for. One thing all LLMs I tried have failed consistently at was finding a movie from a vague description I gave.
