Ask Lemmy

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.

I like being able to generate porn.

Not that I can’t just, you know, FIND porn, but there’s something really fun about trying to generate an image just right, tweaking settings and models until you get the result you’re after.

/shrug

I hate that it monetized general knowledge that use to be easily searchable then repackaged it as some sort of black box randomizer.

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.

I find ChatGPT useful in getting my server to work (since I'm pretty new with Linux)

Other than that, I check in on how local image models are doing around once every couple of months. I would say you can achieve some cool stuff with it, but not really any unusual stuff.

I was really psyched about AI when it first hit my news feed. Now I'm less than impressed. Most generalist AI platforms get things wrong constantly. Having an LLM trained on specific things, like math or science or maybe law, I could see being useful.

We're at the "AI everything" phase instead of the "AI what makes sense" phase.

Text generation is Frozen Yogurt now.

Noticeably worse, but you can have so much more.

It’s really useful for churning out some basic code. For searching the web, it’s providing better results than Google these days.

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.