this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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I will say that (at least the google search ai, my primary interaction) it isn't bad at summarizing search results, by which I mean half the time I google anything i'm looking for reddit discussions where people who know what they're talking about are discussing shit, and it does an okay job at finding and summarizing those. It's consistently better at what i expect it to do than people here act like it is. But it shouldn't take 10000 data centers and enough energy to raise global temps by 10 degrees C
I used Gemini the other day for the second or third time ever. I asked it to reference the 2021 IPC (internat'l plumbing code) and lay out a mocked up bathroom that I am remodeling in the next two weeks. I hate to say it, but it nailed the layout. It followed ADA rules to a tee. It laid out my underground work, and gave me a take off list that was a couple fittings short of my written list. It priced out fittings, pipe, and fixtures. The only thing it couldn't do for me was estimate my time to work everything.
I won't use it except in very rare circumstances but anecdotally it seemed to handle taking a known ruleset (plumbing code) and producing something off of it decently well. It's even drew up my layout in ASCII. I attempted this a couple years back with the 2018 IPC and it fell on its own face trying to layout then.
I'm not sure what my point is here, at any rate.
I think there's a lot of utility for these things and people on here are frequently piss drunk on their own ideology regarding how actually useful they are, but at the same time I wouldn't say it's worth the massive resource cost needed to sustain it
that's my take on the current state of LLMs, obviously they used to be even worse tho
I think in their current state they could definitely save a lot of people a lot of work i.e. your example with plumbing, as long as they're either somehow coded to prevent fucked up bullshit that goes against building regulations, or as long as people are trained/aware enough to look over and fix the results
Despite my opinion of AI there are some use cases for it. I used to be one of those aforementioned piss drunk ideology guys. Im certainly not a convert, but im sort of coming around to the idea that there can be use cases for it, but like you said the resource abuse it requires to make Will Smith eat spaghetti is a travesty.
I think it's pretty obvious there are at least some valid uses for it, like even if it just does simple customer service stuff (before escalating to an actual person) I'm sure it'd save a lot of labor and also people actually being abused by mad hogs
but a lot of the "uses for it" it's also pretty obvious (to me, a total expert who definitely is not a layman when it comes to computers) were also solved forever ago and without token nonsense. Like my only interaction with the Spotify AI stuff so far has been to try to make playlists where it doesn't play songs I've heard before. But I am almost 100% certain "make a playlist with only new plays" was something we could have done with one one millionth the energy in like, 1990
It's basically either copying an already extant text nearly verbatim instead of just providing the original source, or it's latched onto something categorically different and is completely wrong. And in both of those cases it can also just introduce random errors into the answer too.
I've used the duckduckgo interface to chatgpt for researching things where accuracy doesn't matter and I just need something that's vaguely in the right ballpark to build a character generator or the like, and in my experience that's been basically just a shittier version of what google used to be but a less shitty version of what google is now, and it helpfully summarizes complex topics it cannot possibly summarize correctly into usable chunks of garbage.
yeah you say that though but the "completely wrong" seems to be really rare for the things I search for, and when I see people talk about how wrong it is I can't help but think their last interaction with it was literally years ago
When I say "it's better than I expect it to be" though like I mean I expect it to just distill me a bunch of reddit posts with errors throughout, but it's usually generally accurate (distilling those reddit posts, and yes, redditors don't know shit) and the time it takes me to suss out the Wrong Ass Shit it says is about equivalent to the time it'd take me to browse whatever Reddit thread it's stealing from to suss out who knows wtf they're saying
It's not enough for some to hate the technology they also have to convince themselves that it doesn't even work.
It's getting consistently worse, at least Gemini is, somewhere around December it stoped translating some words, so there would be a random Chinese character in an English paragraph, and sometimes it was a made up character, not in the original, but most often it translates characters as numbers, what the fuck is a "question mark 17" supposed to be? It didn't do that last year.
While I am loathe to speak fondly of AI, I did run into a very useful case the other day. It helped me fix my UPS.
Had to replace the battery, but the brand new one was also showing expired. I went back and forth with support for weeks, they ended up sending me a replacement battery. It too showed as expired. Support told me I would need to replace the unit.
So I popped the issue into Deepseek and it managed to find the exceedingly simple solution buried in a years-old forum thread. Apparently there's a configuration mode and I just had to change one value from 0 to 1 to indicate to the unit that the battery had been replaced.
Their own (outsourced) support department didn't even seem to know about this, but it saved me like $1000 having to buy a new UPS.