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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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

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

Make your NPCs and towns and monsters!

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

To me it’s glorified autocomplete. I see LLM as a potencial way of drastically lowering barrier of entry to coding. But I’m at a skill level that coercing a chatbot into writing code is a hiderance. What I need is good documentation and good IDE statical analysis.

I’m still waiting on a good, IDE integrated, local model that would be capable of more that autompleting a line of code. I want it to generate the boiler plate parts of code and get out of my way of solving problems.

What I don’t want, is a fucking chatbot.

I use LLMs for multiple things, and it’s useful for things that are easy to validate. E.g. when you’re trying to find or learn about something, but don’t know the right terminology or keywords to put into a search engine. I also use it for some coding tasks. It works OK for getting customized usage examples for libraries, languages, and frameworks you may not be familiar with (but will sometimes use old APIs or just hallucinate APIs that don’t exist). It works OK for things like “translation” tasks; such as converting a MySQL query to a PostGres query. I tried out GitHub CoPilot for a while, but found that it would sometimes introduce subtle bugs that I would initially overlook, so I don’t use it anymore. I’ve had to create some graphics, and am not at all an artist, but was able to use transmission1111, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Gimp to get usable results (an artist would obviously be much better though). RemBG and works pretty well for isolating the subject of an image and removing the background too. Image upsampling, DLSS, DTS Neural X, plant identification apps, the blind-spot warnings in my car, image stabilization, and stuff like that are pretty useful too.

to copy my own comment from another similar thread:

I’m an idiot with no marketable skills. I put boxes on shelves for a living. I want to be an artist, a musician, a programmer, an author. I am so bad at all of these, and between having a full time job, a significant other, and several neglected hobbies, I don’t have time to learn to get better at something I suck at. So I cheat. If I want art done, I could commission a real artist, or for the cost of one image I could pay for dalle and have as many images as I want (sure, none of them will be quite what I want but they’ll all be at least good). I could hire a programmer, or I could have chatgpt whip up a script for me since I’m already paying for it anyway since I want access to dalle for my art stuff. Since I have chatgpt anyway, I might as well use it to help flesh out my lore for the book I’ll never write. I haven’t found a good solution for music.

I have in my brain a vision for a thing that is so fucking cool (to me), and nobody else can see it. I need to get it out of my brain, and the only way to do that is to actualize it into reality. I don’t have the skills necessary to do it myself, and I don’t have the money to convince anyone else to help me do it. generative AI is the only way I’m going to be able to make this work. Sure, I wish that the creators of the content that were stolen from to train the ai’s were fairly compensated. I’d be ok with my chatgpt subscription cost going up a few dollars if that meant real living artists got paid, I’m poor but I’m not broke.

These are the opinions of an idiot with no marketable skills.

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

I used it the other day to spit out a ~150 line python script. It worked flawlessly on the first try.

I don’t know python.

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.

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.