AI is used extensively in science to sift through gigantic data sets. Mechanical turk programs like Galaxy Zoo are used to train the algorithm. And scientists can use it to look at everything in more detail.

Apart from that AI is just plain fun to play around with. And with the rapid advancements it will probably keep getting more fun.

Personally I hope to one day have an easy and quick way to sort all the images I have taken over the years. I probably only need a GPU in my server for that one.

That's a bit loaded question. By AI I assume you're refering to GenAI/LLMs rather than AI broadly.

• I use it to correct my spelling on longer posts and I find that it improves the clarity and helps my point come across better.
• I use Dall-E to create pictures I never could have before, because despite my interest in drawing, I just never bothered to learn it myself. GenAI enables me to skip the learning and go straight to creating.
• I like that it can simulate famous people and allows me to ask 'them' questions that I never could in real life. For example, yesterday I spent a good while chatting with 'Sam Harris' about the morality of lying and the edge cases where it might be justified. I find discussions like this genuinely enjoyable and insightful.
• I also like using the voice mode where I can just talk with it. As a non-native english speaker, I find it to be good practise to help me improve my ~~spelling~~ pronunciation.

When it just came out I had AI write fanfiction that no sane person would write, and other silly things. I liked that. That and trail cam photos of the Duolingo mascot.

I think my complaints are more with how capitalism treats new technology, though-- and not just lost jobs and the tool on the climate. Greed and competition is making it worse and worse as a technology that AI itself, within a years span, has been enshittified. There are use cases that it can do a world of good, though, just like everything else bad people ruin.

It’s really helped me get recipes without website ads overtaxing my old surface.

i use it to summarize text sometimes, does it count?

You can whip up a whole album of aggressively mid music just cyberbullying the shit out of one person.

If used in the specific niche use cases its trained for, as long as its used as a tool and not a final product. For example, using AI to generate background elements of a complete image. The AI elements aren't the focus, and should be things that shouldn't matter, but it might be better to use an AI element rather than doing a bare minimum element by hand. This might be something like a blurred out environment background behind a peice of hand drawn character art - otherwise it might just be a gradient or solid colour because it isn't important, but having something low-quality is better than having effectively nothing.

In a similar case, for multidisciplinary projects where the artists can't realistically work proficiently in every field required, AI assets may be good enough to meet the minimum requirements to at least complete the project. For example, I do a lot of game modding - I'm proficient with programming, game/level design, and 3D modeling, but not good enough to make dozens of textures and sounds that are up to snuff. I might be able to dedicate time to make a couple of most key resources myself or hire someone, but seeing as this is a non-commercial, non-monitized project I can't buy resources regularly. AI can be a good enough solution to get the project out the door.

In the same way, LLM tools can be good if used as a way to "extend" existing works. Its a generally bad idea to rely entirely on them, but if you use it to polish a sentence you wrote, come up with phrasing ideas, or write your long if-chain for you, then it's a way of improving or speeding up your work.

Basically, AI tools as they are, should be seen as another tool by those in or adjacent to the related profession - another tool in the toolbox rather than a way to replace the human.

My primary use of AI is for programming and debugging. It's a great way to get boilerplate code blocks, bootstrap scripts, one-liner shell commands, creating regular expressions etc. More often than not, I've also learned new things because it ends up using something new that I didn't know about, or approaches I didn't know were possible.

I also find it's a good tool to learn about new things or topics. It's very flexible in giving you a high level summary, and then digging deeper into the specifics of something that might interest you. Summarizing articles, and long posts is also helpful.

Of course, it's not always accurate, and it doesn't always work. But for me, it works more often than not and I find that valuable.

Like every technology, it will follow the Gartner Hype Cycle. We are definitely in the times of "everything-AI" or AI for everything - but I'm sure things will calm down and people will find it valuable for a number of specific things.

I for one welcome our new overlords. (for the funny only)

I think it’s a fun toy that is being misused and forced into a lot of things it isn’t ready for.

I’m doing a lot with AI but it’s pretty much slop. I use self hosted stable diffusion, Ollama, and whisper for a discord bot, code help, writing assistance, and I pay elevenlabs for TTS so I can talk to it. It’s been pretty useful. It’s all running on an old computer with a 3060. Voice chat is a little slow and has its own problems but it’s all been fun to learn.

Tbh it’s made a pretty significant improvement in my life as a software developer. Yeah, it makes shit up/generates garbage code sometimes, but if you know how to read code, debug, and program in general, it really saves a lot of grunt work and tedious language barriers. It can also be a solid rubber duck for debugging.

Basically any time I just need a little script to take x input and give me y output, or a regex, I’ll have ChatGPT write it for me.

Even before AI the corps have been following a strategy of understaffing with the idea that software will make up for it and it hasn't. Its beyond the pale the work I have to do now for almost anything I do related to the private sector (work as their customer not as an employee).

There'd been a few cases where it was helpful. But yeah, I mostly agree

Do I think it's generally useful? No, not at all.

But for very specific purposes it's worth considering as an option.

Text-to-image generation has been worth it to get a jumping-off point for a sketch, or to get a rough portrait for a D&D character.

Regular old ChatGPT has been good on a couple occasions for humor (again D&D related; I asked it for a "help wanted" ad in the style of newspaper personals and the result was hilariously campy)

In terms of actual problem solving... There have been a couple instances where, when Google or Stack Overflow haven't helped, I've asked it for troubleshooting ideas as a last resort. It did manage to pinpoint the issue once, but usually it just ends up that one of the topics or strategies it floats prove to be useful after further investigation. I would never trust anything factual without verifying, or copy/paste code from it directly though.

To me AI is useless. Its not intelligent, its just a blender that blends up tons of results into one hot steaming mug of "knowledge". If you toss a nugget of shit into a smoothie while it's being blended, it's gonna taste like shit. Considering the amount of misinformation on the internet, everything AI spits out is shit.

It is purely derivative, devoid of any true originality with vague facade of intelligence in an attempt to bypass existing copyright law.

The only things I use and I know they have AI are Spotify recommendations, live captions on videos and DLSS. I don't find generative AI to be interesting, but there's nothing wrong with machine learning itself imo if it's used for things that have purpose.

I went for a routine dental cleaning today and my dentist integrated a specialized AI tool to help identify cavities and estimate the progress of decay. Comparing my x-rays between the raw image and the overlay from the AI, we saw a total of 5 cavities. Without the AI, my dentist would have wanted to fill all of them. With the AI, it was narrowed down to 2 that need attention, and the others are early enough that they can be maintained.

I'm all for these types of specialized AIs, and hope to see even further advances in the future.

I use ChatGPT and Copilot as search engines, particularly for programming concepts or technical documentation. The way I figure, since these AI companies are scraping the internet to train these models, it’s incredibly likely that they’ve picked up some bit of information that Google and DDG won’t surface because SEO.

Theres someone I sometimes encounter in a discord Im in that makes a hobby of doing stuff with them (from what I gather seeing it, they do more with it that just asking them for a prompt and leaving them at that, at least partly because it doesnt generally give them something theyre happy with initially and they end up having to ask the thing to edit specific bits of it in different ways over and over until it does). I dont really understand what exactly it is this entails, as what they seem to most like making it do is code "shaders" for them that create unrecognizable abstract patterns, but they spend a lot of time talking at length about technical parameters of various models and what they like and dont like about them, so I assume the guy must find something enjoyable in it all. That being said, using it as a sort of strange toy isnt really the most useful use case.

I love chatgpt, and am dumbfounded at all the AI hate on lemmy. I use it for work. It's not perfect, but helps immensely with snippets of code, as well as learning STEM concepts. Sometimes I've already written some code that I remember vaguely, but it was a long time ago and I need to do it again. The time it would take to either go find my old code, or just research it completely again, is WAY longer than just asking chatgpt. It's extremely helpful, and definitely faster for what I'd already have to do.

I guess it depends on what you use it for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I hope it continues to improve. I hope we get full open source. If I could "teach" it to do certain tasks someday, that would be friggin awesome.

I usually keep abreast of the scene so I'll give a lot of stuff a try. Entertainment wise, making music and images or playing dnd with it is fun but the novelty tends to wear off. Image gen can be useful for personal projects.

Work wise, I mostly use it to do deep dives into things like datasheets and libraries, or doing the boring coding bits. I verify the info and use it in conjunction with regular research but it makes things a lot easier.

Oh, also tts is fun. The actor who played Dumbledore reads me the news and Emma Watson tells me what exercise is next during my workout, although some might frown on using their voices without consent.

Its really good for all kinds scams.

So...

Low Tier / Wannabe Corpos?