this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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I've found that AI has done literally nothing to improve my life in any way and has really just caused endless frustrations. From the enshitification of journalism to ruining pretty much all tech support and customer service, what is the point of this shit?

I work on the Salesforce platform and now I have their dumbass account managers harassing my team to buy into their stupid AI customer service agents. Really, the only AI highlight that I have seen is the guy that made the tool to spam job applications to combat worthless AI job recruiters and HR tools.

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[–] girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

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

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[–] A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

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.

[–] Harvey656@lemmy.world 16 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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. 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.

Preach! I'm surprised to hear it works for people with aphantasia too, and that's awesome. I personally have a very vivid mind's eye and I can often already imagine what I want something to look like, but could never put it to paper in a satisfying way that didn't cost excruciating amount of time. GenAI allows me to do that with still a decent amount of touch up work, but in a much more reasonable timeframe. I'm making more creative work than I've ever been because of it.

It's crazy to me that some people at times completely refuse to even acknowledge such positives about the technology, refuse to interact with it in a way that would reveal those positives, refuse to look at more nuanced opinions of people that did interact with it, refuse even simple facts about how we learn and interact with other art and material, refusing legal realities like the freedom to analyze that allow this technology to exist (sometimes even actively fighting to restrict those legal freedoms, which would hurt more artists and creatives than it would help, and give even more more power to corporations and those with enough capital to self sustain AI model creation).

It's tiring, but luckily it seems to be mostly an issue on the internet. Talking to people (including artists) in real life about it shows that it's a very tiny fraction that holds that opinion. Keep creating 👍

[–] FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works 11 points 5 days ago

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.

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] Aeri@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] Sergebr@lemmynsfw.com 5 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (6 children)

This is like saying you can't play video games because it costs electricity and you can go without. You can say it about literally everything that isn't strictly necessary to live. AI isn't just LLMs and only LLMs have a high environmental cost, and unless you are literally wasting the output like the big tech companies are, even that can be justified for the right reasons.

[–] Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (9 children)

Hey man, why are we using the internet, don't you see this is bad for the environment, while your at it. stop wearing clothes! Our ancestors were able to get by with just our body hair, we're ruining nature.

That's how I read the post above you.

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[–] bluewing@lemm.ee 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

Then the use of AI advancements in medicine is right out then too? I pretty sure the radiologist that has looked at my MRI this past week looking for lung damage, (thanks long covid!), used it in some form. And my Wife's upcoming mammogram will also use some form of AI to assist in diagnosis. Or the scheduling department for these appointments that used their own type of AI to manage 1000's of appointments per month and year. And this is just one example where AI is quickly becoming indispensable.

AI can be tremendously useful for somethings and useless for other things. Painting with such a large brush like you do makes you no better than those tech bros who push AI for everything to make it all more impressive sounding.

Carp: edit for missed letter

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[–] Wahots@pawb.social 3 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 15 points 6 days ago

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

[–] 2ugly2live@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

I made an AI song for my mom's birthday on Suno and she loved it so much she cried. So that was nice.

I don't like how people are using it to just replace artists. It would be find if it's just to automate some things, like, "AI can tell you when ___ needs to be replaced," but it feels more like it's being used as a stick to workers. Like, "Keep acting up and I'll replace you with dun dun dun AI!"

[–] Harrk@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It helps when writing a lot of boilerplate or if I’m being lazy and want to solve something. However I do not need AI in everything I use. It seems everyone wants AI in their product whilst it’s doing the same thing everyone else is doing.

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[–] HeyMrDeadMan@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Erotic Roleplay. You're welcome?

[–] mechoman444@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

It's funny you mention this, but the erotic roleplay aspect of llms is a thriving business generating millions of dollars every month now in subscription costs.

We've barely even scratching the surface of what these models can do and they're increasing in usage at an exponential rate.

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

that's gotta count, right?

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

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[–] sfxrlz@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

it’s useful for programming from time to time. But not for asking open questions. I’ve found having to double check is too unnerving and letting it just provide the links instantly is more my way of working. Other than that it sometimes sketches things out when I have no idea what to do, so all in all it’s a glorified search engine for me.

Other than work I despise writing emails and reports and it fluffs them up. I usually have to edit them afterwards to not make em look ai-made but it adds some „substance“.

[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] tehmics@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

It's great for parsing through the enshittified journalism. You know the classic recipe blog trope? If you ask chatgpt for a recipe, it just gives you one. Whether it's good or not is a different story, but chatgpt is leagues better at getting to the info you want than search has been for the last decade.

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[–] kinther@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] barsquid@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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

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[–] null@slrpnk.net 6 points 5 days ago

I work on a 20+ year knowledge base for a big company that has had no real content management governance for pretty much that whole time.

We knew there was duplicate content in that database, but were talking about thousands of articles, with several more added daily.

With such a small team, identifying duplicate/redundant content was just an ad-hoc thing that could never be tackled as a whole without a huge amount of resources.

AI was able to comb through everything and find hundreds of articles with duplicate/redundant content within a few hours. Now we have a list of articles we can work through and clean up.

[–] weker01@sh.itjust.works 7 points 5 days ago

I have horrible spelling and sometimes write in an archaic register. I also often write in a way that sounds rather aggressive which is not my intention most of the time. Ai helps me rewrite that shit and makes me more sensitive to tone in written text.

Of course just like normal spell check and auto completion feature one still needs to read it a final time.

[–] GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee 8 points 5 days ago

I've enjoyed some of the absurd things out can come up with. Surreal videos and memes (every president as a bodybuilder wrestler). However it's never been useful and the cost isn't worth the benefit, to me.

Its great for documentation like APIs and it really makes a difference

[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] arrakark@10291998.xyz 3 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] spittingimage@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

I've been finding it useful for altering recipes to take my wife's allergies into account. I don't use it for much else. And certainly not for anything important.

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