Ask Lemmy

I created a funny AI voice recording of Ben Shapiro talking about cat girls.

ChatGPT is incredibly good at helping you with random programming questions, or just dumping a full ass error text and it telling you exactly what's wrong.

This afternoon I used ChatGPT to figure out what the error preventing me from updating my ESXi server. I just copy pasted the entire error text which was one entire terminal windows worth of shit, and it knew that there was an issue accessing the zip. It wasn't smart enough to figure out "hey dumbass give it a full file path not relative" but eventually I got there. Earlier this morning I used it to write a cross apply instead of using multiple sub select statements. It forgot to update the order by, but that was a simple fix. I use it for all sorts of other things we do at work too. ChatGPT won't replace any programmers, but it will help them be more productive.

If AI is for anything it's for DnD campaign art.

Make your NPCs and towns and monsters!

I agree, I don’t really use it but I do like some of the memes that came out of it, case in point:

I thought it was pretty fun to play around with making limericks and rap battles with friends, but I haven't found a particularly usefull use case for LLMs.

Personally I use it when I can't easily find an answer online. I still keep some skepticism about the answers given until I find other sources to corroborate, but in a pinch it works well.

It tends to make Lemmy people mad for some reason, but I find GitHub copilot to be helpful.

Yes:

• Demystifying obscure or non-existent documentation
• Basic error checking my configs/code: input error, ask what the cause is, double check it's work. In hour 6 of late night homelab fixing this can save my life
• I use it to create concepts of art I later commission. Most recently I used it to concept an entirely new avatar and I'm having a pro make it in their style for pay
• DnD/Cyberpunk character art generation, this person does not exist website basically
• duplicate checking / spot-the-diffetences, like pastebins "differences" feature because the MMO I play released prelim as well as full patch notes and I like to read the differences

I got high and put in prompts to see what insane videos it would make. That was fun. I even made some YouTube videos from it. I also saw some cool & spooky short videos that are basically "liminal" since it's such an inhuman construction.

But generally, no. It's making the internet worse. And as a customer I definitely never want to deal with an AI instead of a human.

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.

In the sense that a forum I am on has had a huge amount of fun doing very silly things with Godzilla, yes.

https://forums.mst3k.com/t/dall-e-fun-with-an-ai/24697/8237

It's best to start at the bottom. We didn't start out with Godzilla when the thread began and it also began in 2022.

8220 posts, the majority Godzilla-related. I haven't done too many lately, but here's a few recent ones:

I use perplexity.ai more than google now. I still don’t love it and it’s more of a testament to how far google has fallen than the usefulness of AI, but I do find myself using it to get a start on basic searches. It is, dare I say, good at calorie counting and language learning things. Helps calculate calorie to gram ratios and the math is usually correct. It also helps me with German, since it’s good at finding patterns and how German people typically say what I am trying to say, instead of just running it through a translator which may or not have the correct context.

I do miss the days where I could ask AI to talk like Obama while he’s taking a shit during an earthquake. ChatGPT would let you go off the rails when it first came out. That was a lot of fun and I laughed pretty hard at the stupid scenarios I could come up with. I’m probably the reason the guardrails got added.

I use silly tavern for character conversations, pretty fun. I have SD forge for Pomy diffusion, and use Suno and Udio. Almost all of that goes to DND, the rest for personal recreation. Google and openai all fail to meet my use cases and if I cuss they get mad so fuck em. I never use those for making money or any other personal progression, that would be wrong.

Garbage in; garbage out. Using AI tools is a skillset. I've had great use with LLMs and generative AI both, you just have to use the tools to their strengths.

LLMs are language models. People run into issues when they try to use them for things not language related. Conversely, it's wonderful for other tasks. I use it to tone check things I'm unsure about. Or feed it ideas and let it run with them in ways I don't think to. It doesn't come up with too much groundbreaking or new on its own, but I think of it as kinda a "shuffle" button, taking what I have already largely put together, and messing around with it til it becomes something new.

Generative AI isn't going to make you the next mona Lisa, but it can make some pretty good art. It, once again, requires a human to work with it, though. You can't just tell it to spit out an image and expect 100% quality, 100% of the time. Instead, it's useful to get a basic idea of what you want in place, then take it to another proper photo editor, or inpainting, or some other kind of post processing to refine it. I have some degree of aphantasia - I have a hard time forming and holding detailed mental images. This kind of AI approaches art in a way that finally kinda makes sense for my brain, so it's frustrating seeing it shot down by people who don't actually understand it.

I think no one likes any new fad that's shoved down their throats. AI doesn't belong in everything. We already have a million chocolate chip cookie recipes, and chatgpt doesn't have taste buds. Stop using this stuff for tasks it wasn't meant for (unless it's a novelty "because we could" kind of way) and it becomes a lot more palatable.

The image generators have been great for making token art for my dnd campaign. Other than that, no.

I use it all the time, to translate, explain, give guides, write code, do repetitive menial tasks, fix code, understand others code.

I get the hatred for it, but I use it almost every day.

There's a handful of actual good use-cases. For example, Spotify has a new playlist generator that's actually pretty good. You give it a bunch of terms and it creates a playlist of songs from those terms. It's just crunching a bunch of data to analyze similarities with words. That's what it's made for.

It's not intelligence. It's a data crunching tool to find correlations. Anyone treating it like intelligence will create nothing more than garbage.

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

If you specifically mean LLM/GenAI:

• Some of my friends enjoy fucking around with those character AIs. I never got the appeal, even as an RP nerd, RPing is a social activity to me, and computers aren't people
• I have seen funny memes be made with Image Generators -- And tbqh as long as you're not pretending that being an AI prompter makes you an "artist", by all means go crazy with generating AI images for your furry porn/DnD campaign/whatever
• https://goblin.tools/ is a cool little thing for people as intensely autistic as I am, and it runs off AI stuff.
• Voice Recognition/Dictation technology powered by AI is a lot better than its pre-AI sibling. I've been giving it a shot lately. It helps my arthritis-ridden hands.

If you mean anything that utilizes machine learning ("AI" is a buzzword), then "AI" technology has been used to help scientists and doctors do their jobs better since the mid 90s

I have a local instance of Stable Diffusion that I use to make art for MtG proxies. Prior to AI my art was limited to geometric designs and edits of existing pieces. Integrating AI into my work flow has expanded my abilities greatly, and my art experience means that I can do more with it than just prompt engineering.

Generative AI has been an absolute game changer in my retouching work. Slightly worrying that it'll put me out of work sometime in the future, but for now it's saving me loads of time, handling the boring stuff so I can concentrate on the stuff it can't do.

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.

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.

Good for rephrasing things when I'm having trouble.

It helps make simple code when Im feeling lazy at work and need to get something out the door.

In personal life, I run a local llm server with SillyTavern, and get into some kinky shit that often makes for an intense masturbation session. Sorry not sorry.

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

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).

Depends on what you mean by "like" lol

It's nice to generate images of settings for my d&d campaign.
It's nice that I can replace Google/Siri with something I run and control locally, for controlling my home.

But those aren't really important things

An LLM (large language model, a.k.a. an AI whose output is natural language text based on a natural language text prompt) is useful for the tasks when you're okay with 90% accuracy generated at 10% of the cost and 1,000% faster. And where the output will solely be used in-house by yourself and not served to other people. For example, if your goal is to generate an abstract for a paper you've written, AI might be the way to go since it turns a writing problem into a proofreading problem.

The Google Search LLM which summarises search results is good enough for most purposes. I wouldn't rely on it for in-depth research but like I said, it's 90% accurate and 1,000% faster. You just have to be mindful of this limitation.

I don't personally like interacting with customer service LLMs because they can only serve up help articles from the company's help pages, but they are still remarkably good at that task. I don't need help pages because the reason I'm contacting customer service to begin with is because I couldn't find the solution using the help pages. It doesn't help me, but it will no doubt help plenty of other people whose first instinct is not to read the f***ing manual. Of course, I'm not going to pretend customer service LLMs are perfect. In fact, the most common problem with them seems to be that they go "off the script" and hallucinate solutions that obviously don't work, or pretend that they've scheduled a callback with a human when you request it, but they actually haven't. This is a really common problem with any sort of LLM.

At the same time, if you try to serve content generated by an LLM and then present it as anything of higher quality than it actually is, customers immediately detest it. Most LLM writing is of pretty low quality anyway and sounds formulaic, because to an extent, it was generated by a formula.

Consumers don't like being tricked, and especially when it comes to creative content, I think that most people appreciate the human effort that goes into creating it. In that sense, serving AI content is synonymous with a lack of effort and laziness on the part of whoever decided to put that AI there.

But yeah, for a specific subset of limited use cases, LLMs can indeed be a good tool. They aren't good enough to replace humans, but they can certainly help humans and reduce the amount of human workload needed.

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.

ChatGPT has mostly replaced tradsearch for me, at least when I'm looking for something that can't be accurately described in 2-3 words

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.

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 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.

It's done a lot of bad/annoying things but I'd be lying if I said it hasn't enabled me to completely sidestep the enshittification of Google. You have to be smart about how you use it but at least you don't have to wade through all the SEO slop to find what you want.

And it's good for weird/niche questions. I used it the other day to find a list of meme songs that have very few/simple instruments so that I could find midi files for them that would translate well when going through Rust's in-game instruments. I seriously doubt I'd find a list like that on Google, even without the enshittification.