I also think somehow AI is getting less useful. The tighter they reign in what it's allowed to say and do and the more it sounds like a corporate tool, the less fun it is to try bending it to new purposes. We can draw and edit pictures, and we can summarize information, and we can write extremely simple computer code.

You can also make passable porn and smut, but the efforts to not let it do those things cripple it for other purposes such as tabletop roleplaying. I wrote a discord bot for this purpose almost a year also and I've spent way more time fighting with the prompt to allow combat or relationships than I have writing code and it's tedious. It's free to use in my private discord with a few select friends and no one has done anything with it in months. And these friends are all AI enthusiasts who became friends through AI Dungeon.

As an unregulated wild west frontier, AI is great and inspires creativity. As a sanitized corporate propaganda machine, it's really quite dull. I'm hoping some less censored versions catch up to OAI, but for now it feels like the gold rush is dying because it turned out to be nothing but pyrite.

Probably a little of both, but I really don’t think there are very many practical applications for current AI technology.

I don't think that's true at all.

A couple of days ago I read a post about someone using ChatGPT to generate commit messages from the diff. That's pretty cool.

Chatbots are also surprisingly helpful. Today's technology is already good enough to put together working expert systems. I'd love to have something like a chatbot that was fed something like all the papers from one or more academic journals related to a specialized field, and be able to ask it open-ended questions.

I think that nowadays the limit for actually useful AI is the imagination of those who work on today's cutting edge AI. It would be cool to hear more about those.