Regardless of how useful some might find it, there isn’t a single use case that justifies the environmental cost (not to mention the societal cost). None. Stop using it. You were able to survive and function without it 2 years ago, and you still can.

I use it for coding (rarely pure copy paste), explaining code, use/examples, finding tools to use. Better translation than Google translate for Japanese. Asking for things that search engines only gives generic results for.

For the most part it's not useful, at least not the way people use it most of the time.
It's an engine for producing text that's most like the text it's seen before, or for telling you what text it's seen before is most like the text you just gave it.

When it comes to having a conversation, it can passibly engage in small talk, or present itself as having just skimmed the Wikipedia article on some topic.
This is kinda nifty and I've actually recently found it useful for giving me literally any insignificant mental stimulation to keep me awake while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

Using it to replace thinking or interaction gives you a substandard result.
Using it as a language interface to something else can give better results.

I've seen it used as an interface to a set of data collection interfaces, where all it needed to know how to do was tell the user what things they could ask about, and then convert their responses into inputs for the API, and show them the resulting chart. Since it wasn't doing anything to actually interpret the data, it never came across as "wrong".

Playing with it on my own computer, locally hosting it and running it offline, has been pretty cool. I find it really impressive when it's something open source and community driven. I also think there are a lot of useful applications for things that are traditionally not solvable with traditional programming.

However a lot of the pushed corporate AI feels not that useful, and there's something about it that really rubs me the wrong way.

I have found ChatGPT to be better than Google for random questions I have, asking for general advice in a whole bunch of things but sido what to go for other sources. I also use it to extrapolate data, come up with scheduling for work (I organise some volunteer shifts) and lots of excel formulae.

I used to spend 1 month a year where all I did was write performance reports on people I supervise. Now I put the facts in let AI write the first draft, do some editing and I'm done in a week.

Well I use AI to generate Happy Birthday images with the persons name in the greetings.

that's gotta count, right?

My corp has been very skeptical and suspicious. So far the only allowed ai is to summarize slack. For channels that I want to keep in the loop but not waste time monitoring, it creates a nice summary of recent traffic.

I was trying to help one guy who used an online ai despite it being against policy. However he was just using it as a search engine to find a code solution and it took way too long to give him the wrong answer. A search engine would have been faster but he’d have to use his own judgement to identify the wrong answer. Pretty arrogant guy despite not knowing what he was doing, so I didn’t fight it when he insisted he was going to follow what it told him

I needed instructions on how to downgrade the firmware of my Unifi UDR because they pushed a botched update. I searched for a while and could only find vague references to SSH and upgrading.

They had a “Unifi GPT” bot so I figured what the hell. I asked “how to downgrade udr firmware to stable”. It gave me effective step by step instructions on how to enable SSH, SSH in and what commands to run to do so. Worked like a charm.

So yeah, I think the problem is we’re in the hype era of LLMs. They’re being over applied at lots of things they aren’t good at. But it’s extremism in the other direction to say there aren’t functions they can do well.

They are at least better than your average canned chat/search bot or ill informed CSR at finding an answer to your question. I think they can help with lots of frustrating or opaque computer related tasks, or at least point you in the right direction or surface something you might not be able to find easily otherwise.

They just aren’t going to write programs for you or do your office job for you like execs think they will.

I like to make karaoke tracks of music I like using an AI vocal remover. Other than that, no.

There are plenty of uses for it. There are also plenty of bad implementations that don't use it in a way that helps anyone.

We're going through an overhyped period currently but we'll see actual uses in a few years once the dust settles. About 10 years ago, a similar thing happened with AI vision and now everyone has filters they can use on cameras and face detection. We'll reach another plateau until the next tech hype comes about.

Its really good for all kinds scams.

So...

Low Tier / Wannabe Corpos?

I’ve used it to fill in the gaps for DND storyline. I’ll give it a prompt and a couple of story arcs then I’ll tell it to write in a certain style, say a cowardly king or dogmatic paladin. From there it will spit out a story. If I don’t like certain affects, I’ll tell it to rewrite a section with some other detail in mind. It does a fantastic job and saves me some of the guesswork.

I've never had AI code run straight off the bat - generally because if I've resorted to asking an AI, I've already spent an hour googling - but it often gives me a starting point to narrow my search.

There's been a couple of times it's been useful outside of coding/config - for example, finding the name of some legal concepts can be fairly hard with traditional search, if you don't know the surrounding terminology.

For the most part, it's worthless garbage.

I use chatgpt to make questions for me when my teachers refuse to give me anything to practice on before final exams. Even then, I'd take literally anything they'd give over whatever AI can generate

I have a custom agent that i ask questions to that then goes and finds sources then answers my question. Can do math by writing python code and using the result. I uae it almost exclusively instead of regular search. Ai makes coding far quicker giving examples remeber shit i cant remeber how to use writing basic functions etc.

Writing emails. Making profile pictures.

I used to enjoy the tldr bot on lemmy till some fascist decided to kill it instead of just letting people block it.

A friend's wife "makes" and sells AI slop prints. He had to make a twitter account so he could help her deal with the "harassment". Not sure exactly what she's dealing with, but my friend and I have slightly different ideas of what harassment is and I'm not interested in hearing more about the situation. The prints I've seen look like generic fantasy novel art that you'd see at the checkout line of a grocery store.

It looks impressive on the surface but if you approach it with any genuine scrutiny it falls apart and you can see that it doesn't know how to draw for shit.

I find it helpful to chat about a topic sometimes as long as it's not based on pure facts, You can talk about your feelings with it.

There are a few uses where it genuinely speeds up editing/insertion into contracts and warns of you of red flags/riders that might open you up to unintended liability. BUT the software is $$$$ and you generally need a law degree before you even need a tool like that. For those that are constantly up to their chins in legal shit, it can be helpful. I'm not, thankfully.

ChatGPT can be useful or fun every now and then but besides that no.

I built a spreadsheet for a client that sorts their email into threads and then segments various conversations into a different view based on shipment numbers mentioned in the conversations. But it's a lot of work to get something like this set up. Am thinking of going into consulting/implementation.

I ask it a lot of technical questions that are broad and non-specific. It helps to quickly get a gauge on what is the correct way to implement something.