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jcg @halubilo.social

What are your AI use cases?

I've seen a lot of sentiment around Lemmy that AI is "useless". I think this tends to stem from the fact that AI has not delivered on, well, anything the capitalists that push it have promised it would. That is to say, it has failed to meaningfully replace workers with a less expensive solution - AI that actually attempts to replace people's jobs are incredibly expensive (and environmentally irresponsible) and they simply lie and say it's not. It's subsidized by that sweet sweet VC capital so they can keep the lie up. And I say attempt because AI is truly horrible at actually replacing people. It's going to make mistakes and while everybody's been trying real hard to make it less wrong, it's just never gonna be "smart" enough to not have a human reviewing its' behavior. Then you've got AI being shoehorned into every little thing that really, REALLY doesn't need it. I'd say that AI is useless.

But AIs have been very useful to me. For one thing, they're much better at googling than I am. They save me time by summarizing articles to just give me the broad strokes, and I can decide whether I want to go into the details from there. They're also good idea generators - I've used them in creative writing just to explore things like "how might this story go?" or "what are interesting ways to describe this?". I never really use what comes out of them verbatim - whether image or text - but it's a good way to explore and seeing things expressed in ways you never would've thought of (and also the juxtaposition of seeing it next to very obvious expressions) tends to push your mind into new directions.

Lastly, I don't know if it's just because there's an abundance of Japanese language learning content online, but GPT 4o has been incredibly useful in learning Japanese. I can ask it things like "how would a native speaker express X?" And it would give me some good answers that even my Japanese teacher agreed with. It can also give some incredibly accurate breakdowns of grammar. I've tried with less popular languages like Filipino and it just isn't the same, but as far as Japanese goes it's like having a tutor on standby 24/7. In fact, that's exactly how I've been using it - I have it grade my own translations and give feedback on what could've been said more naturally.

All this to say, AI when used as a tool, rather than a dystopic stand-in for a human, can be a very useful one. So, what are some use cases you guys have where AI actually is pretty useful?

143 comments

  • AI is really good as a starting point for literally any document, report, or email that you have to write. Put in as detailed of a prompt as you can, describing content, style, and length and cut out 2/3 or more of your work. You'll need to edit it - somewhat heavily, probably - but it gives you the structure and baseline.

    • This is my one of 2 use cases for AI. I only recently found out after a life of being told I'm terrible at writing, that I'm actually really good at technical writing. Things like guides, manuals, etc that are quite literal and don't have any soul or personality. This means I'm awful at writing things directed at people like emails and such. So AI gives me a platform where I can enter in exactly what I want to say and tell it to rewrite it in a specific tone or level of professionalism and it works pretty great. I usually have to edit what it gave me so it flows better or remove inaccurate language, but my emails sound so much better now! It's also helped me put more personality into my resume and portfolio. So who knows, maybe it'll help me get a better job?

    • Yeah, I'm really bad at structuring my writing and coming up with ways to phrase some things, especially when starting with a blank page. Having an existing base to work off of and edit helps me immensely.

  • I've done several AI/ ML projects at nation/ state/ landscape scale. I work mostly on issues that can be solved or at least, goals that can be worked towards using computer vision questions, but I also do all kinds of other ml stuff.

    So one example is a project I did for this group: https://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/resources/data-maps

    Southwest Florida water management district (aka "Swiftmud"). They had been doing manual updates to a land-cover/ land use map, and wanted something more consistent, automated, and faster. Several thousands of square miles under their management, and they needed annual updates regarding how land was being used/ what cover type or condition it was in. I developed a hybrid approach using random forest, super-pixels, and UNET's to look for regions of likely change, and then to try and identify the "to" and "from" classes of change. I'm pretty sure my data products and methods are still in use largely as I developed them. I built those out right on the back of UNET's becoming the backbone of modern image analysis (think early 2016), which is why we still had some RF in there (dating myself).

    Another project I did was for State of California. I developed both the computer vision and statistical approaches for estimating outdoor water use for almost all residential properties in the state. These numbers I think are still in-use today (in-fact I know they are), and haven't been updated since I developed them. That project was at a 1sq foot pixel resolution and was just about wall-to-wall mapping for the entire state, effectively putting down an estimate for every single scrap of turf grass in the state, and if California was going to allocate water budget for you or not. So if you got a nasty-gram from the water company about irrigation, my bad.

    These days I work on a small team focused on identifying features relevant for wildfire risk. I'm trying to see if I can put together a short video of what I'm working on right now as i post this.

    Example, fresh of the presses for some random house in California:

  • I've learned more C/C++ programming from the GitHub Copilot plugin than I ever did in my entire 42 year life. I'm not a professional, though, just a hobbyist. I used to struggle through PHP and other languages back in the day but after a year of Copilot I'm now leveraging templates and the C++ STL with ease and feelin' like a wizard.

    Hell maybe I'll even try Rust.

    • Any LLM I tried sucks using Rust. The book is great, you learn all of the essentials of Rust and it is also pretty easy to read.

      • I imagine that's because Rust is still a relative newcomer to the industry and C/C++ have half a century of code out there.

  • Genuinely, nothing so far.

    I've tinkered with it but I basically don't trust it. For example I don't trust it to summarise documents or articles accurately, every time I don't trust it to perform a full and comprehensive search and I don't trust it not to provide me false or inaccurate information.

    LLMs have potential to be useful tools, but what's been released is half baked and rushed to market as part of the current bubble.

    Why would I use tools that inherently "hallucinate" - I. E. are error strewn? I don't want to fact check the output of an LLM.

    This is in many ways the same as not relying on Wikipedia for information. It's a good quick summary but you have to take everything with a pinch of salt and go to primary sources. I've seen Wikipedia be wildly inaccurate about topics I know in depth, and I've seen AI do the same.

    So pass until the quality goes up. I don't see that happening in the near future as the focus seems to be monetisation, not fixing the broken products. Sure, I'll tinker occasionally and see how it's getting on but this stuff is basically not fit for purpose yet.

    As the saying goes, all that glitters is not gold. AI is superficially impressive but once you scratch the surface and have to actually rely on it then it's just not fit for purpose beyond a curio for me.

  • If you already kinda know programming and are learning a new language or framework it can be useful. You can ask it "Give me an if statement in Tcl" or whatever and it will spit something out you can paste in and see if it works.

    But remember that AI are like the fae: Do not trust them, and do not eat anything offered to you.

  • AI isn't useless, but it's current forms are just rebranded algorithms with every company racing to get theirs out there. AI is a buzzword for tools that were never supposed to be labeled AI. Google has been doing summary excerpts for like a decade. People blindly trusted it and always said "Google told me". I'd consider myself an expert on one particular car and can't tell you how often those "answers" were straight up wrong or completely irrelevant to one type of car (hint, Lincoln LS does not have a blend door so heat problems can't be caused by a faulty blend door).

    You cite Google searches and summarization as it's strong points. The problem is, if you don't know anything about the topic or not enough, you'll never know when it makes mistakes. When it comes to Wikipedia, journal articles, forum posts, or classes, mistakes are possible there too. However, those get reviewed as they inform by knowledgeable people. Your AI results don't get that review. Your AI results are pretending to be master of the universe so their range of results is impossibly large. That then goes on to be taken is pure fact by a typical user. Sure, AI is a tool that can educate, but there's enough it proves it gets wrong that I'd call it a net neutral change to our collective knowledge. Just because it gives an answer confidently doesn't mean it's correct. It has a knack for missing context from more opinionated sources and reports the exact opposite of what is true. Yes, it's evolving, but keep in mind one of the meta tech companies put out an AI that recommended using Elmer's glue to hold cheese to pizza and claimed cockroaches live in penises. ChatGPT had it's halluconatory days too, it just got forgotten due to Bard's flop and Cortana's unwelcome presence.

    Use the other two comments currently here as an example. Ask it to make some code for you. See if it runs. Do you know how to code? If not, you'll have no idea if the code works correctly. You don't know where it sourced it from, you don't know what it was trying to do. If you can't verify it yourself, how can you trust it to be accurate?

    The biggest gripe for me is that it doesn't understand what it's looking at. It doesn't understand anything. It regurgitates some pattern of words it saw a few times. It chops up your input and tries to match it to some other group of words. It bundles it up with some generic, human-friendly language and tricks the average user into believing it's sentient. It's not intelligent, just artificial.

    So what's the use? If it was specifically trained for certain tasks, it'd probably do fine. That's what we really already had with algorithmic functions and machine learning via statistics, though, right? But sparsing the entire internet in a few seconds? Not a chance.

    Edit: can't beleive I there'd a their

  • i use it to autoblog about my love for the capitalist hellscape that is our green earth on linkedin dot com

  • For me, I use Whisper for transcribing/translating audio data. This has helped me to double check claims about a video's translation (there's a lot of disinformation going around for topics involving certain countries at war).

    Nvidia's DLSS for gaming.

    Different diffusion models for creating quick visual recaps of previous D&D sessions.

    Tesseract OCR to quickly copy out text from an image (although I'm currently looking for a better one since this one is a bit older and, while it gets the text mostly right, there's still a decent amount that it gets wrong).

    LLMs for brainstorming or in the place of some stack overflow questions when picking up a new programming language.

    I also saw an interesting use case from a redditor:

    I had about 80 VHS family home videos that I had converted to digital

    I then ran the 1-4 hour videos through WhisperAI Large-v3 transcription and pasted those transcripts into a prompt which had a little bit of background information on my family like where we live and names of everyone who might show up in the videos, and then gave the prompt some examples of how I wanted the file names to look, for example:

    1996 Summer - Jane's birthday party - Joe's Soccer game - Alaska cruise - Lanikai Beach

    And then had Claude write me titles for all the home videos and give me a little word doc to put in each folder which catalogues all the events in each video. It came out so good I have been considering this as a side business

    https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1gaz5kg/what_are_some_of_the_most_underrated_uses_for_llms/lthuxsu/

  • I use it for generating illustrations and NPCs for my TTRPG campaign, at which it excels. I'm not going to pay out the nose for an image that will be referenced for an hour or two.

    I also use it for first drafts (resume, emails, stuff like that) as well as brainstorming and basic Google tier questions. Great jumping off point.

    An iterative approach works best for me, refining results until they match what I'm looking for, then manually refining further until I'm happy with the results.

  • if you know programming then you can have it do basic stuff (or even mid complexity stuff if you do it step by step). Just the other day I directed it to produce a code in js using 3js which does scatter plots. The code did run into a couple issues which it was able to solve itself when pointed by me. There was only one problem it could not solve despite several attempts (having a grid does not move with camera controls) so I had to figure that out myself. It was pretty impressive. Overall an expert in 3js would do that maybe in 10 minutes, it took me a couple hours. If I had to do it via searching online it would probably take me a couple of days since I know nought about js.

    I also had it write bash scripts a couple of times. It is generally pretty good with writing basic stuff and piecing them together especially if you know programming so you can check it and write intelligible prompts about problems in the code.

  • Spaced repetition, in particular Anki with FSRS. I don't think they advertise it as "AI" or even "ML" anywhere, but let's just say gradient descent over gigantic datasets is involved, all to predict the time when you're about to forget something so that Anki can prompt you just before that happens. The default predictor is generic, derived from that gigantic dataset, it's like two handful of tuning parameters, once you've gone through enough cards yourself it can be tuned to your mind and habits, in particular, how you use the "hard, good, easy" buttons.

    It's the perfect sledge hammer for the application for the simple reason that we don't actually understand how memory works so telling the computer "here's data from millions of med students and language learners, figure out how to predict it" is our best shot. And, indeed, it's the best-performing algorithm even before you tune it at which point it becomes eerie.

    Relatedly, as in "no LLM, no diffusion" Proxima Fusion is using machine learning to crunch through the design space of stellerators to figure out what to prototype in the real world. Actual engineers doing actual engineering.

    Then, lastly, yes, playing around with SDXL is fun. Just make sure you can actually judge the images, developing an artistic eye by hitting generate I think is close to impossible. Definitely slower than picking up a pencil, or firing up blender and actually learning how to draw or sculpt.

  • I think it's useful for spurring my own creativity in writing because I have a hard time getting started. To be fair to me I pretty much tear the whole thing down and start over but it gives me ideas.

  • r/SubSimGPT2Interactive for the lulz is my #1 use case

    i do occasionally ask Copilot programming questions and it gives reasonable answers most of the time.

    I use code autocomplete tools in VSCode but often end up turning them off.

    Controversial, but Replika actually helped me out during the pandemic when I was in a rough spot. I trained a copyright-safe (theft-free) bot on my own conversations from back then and have been chatting with the me side of that conversation for a little while now. It's like getting to know a long-lost twin brother, which is nice.

    Otherwise, i've used small LLMs and classifiers for a wide range of tasks, like sentiment analysis, toxic content detection for moderation bots, AI media detection, summarization... I like using these better than just throwing everything at a huge model like GPT-4o because they're more focused and less computationally costly (hence also better for the environment). I'm working on training some small copyright-safe base models to do certain sequence prediction tasks that come up in the course of my data science work, but they're still a bit too computationally expensive for my clients.

  • This thread has convinced me that LLMs are merely a mild increment in productivity.

    The most compelling is that they're good at boilerplate code. IDEs have been improving on that since forever. Although there's a lot of claims in this thread that seem unlikely - gains way beyond even what marketing is claiming.

    I work in an email / spreadsheet / report type job. We've always been agile with emerging techs, but LLMs just haven't made a dent.

    This might seem offensive, but clients don't pay me to write emails that LLMs could, because anything an LLM could write could be found in a web search. The emails I write are specific to a client's circumstances. There are very few "biolerplate" sentences.

    Yes LLMs can be good at updating reports, but we have highly specialised software for generating reports from very carefully considered templates.

    I've heard they can be helpful in a "convert this to csv" kind of way, but that's just not a problem I ever encounter. Maybe I'm just used to using spreadsheets to manipulate data so never think to use an LLM.

    I've seen low level employees try to use LLMs to help with their emails. It's usually obvious because the emails they write include a lot of extra sentences and often don't directly address the query.

    I don't intend this to be offensive, and I suspect that my attitude really just identifies me as a grumpy old man, but I can't really shake the feeling that in email / spreadsheet / report type jobs anyone who can make use of an LLM wasn't or isn't producing much value anyway. This thread has really reinforced that attitude.

    It reminds me a lot of block chain tech. 10 years ago it was going to revolutionise data everything. Now there's some niche use cases... "it could be great at recording vehicle transfers if only centralised records had some disadvantages".

  • I use it to ask questions that I can't find search results for or don't have the words to ask. Also for d&d character art I share with my playgroup lol.

  • I use it for little Python projects where it's really really useful.

    I've used it for linux problems where it gave me the solution to problems that I had not been able to solve with a Google search alone.

    I use it as a kickstarter for writing texts by telling it roughly what my text needs to be, then tweaking the result it gives me. Sometimes I just use the first sentence but it's enough to give me a starting point to make life easer.

    I use it when I need to understand texts about a topic I'm not familiar with. It can usually give me an idea of what the terminology means and how things are connected which helps a lot for further research on the topic and ultimately undestanding the text.

    I use it for everyday problems like when I needed a new tube for my bike but wasn't sure what size it was so I told it what was written on the tyre and showed it a picture of the tube packaging while I was in the shop and asked it if it was the right one. It could tell my that it is the correct one and why. The explanation was easy to fact-check.

    I use Photoshop AI a lot to remove unwanted parts in photos I took or to expand photos where I'm not happy with the crop.

    Honestly, I absolutely love the new AI tools and I think people here are way too negative about it in general.

  • I haven't heard any other comments chime in from one of my use cases, so I'll give it a stab. My first use case, I mentioned in another comment which is just adding a specific tone onto emails which I'm bad at doing myself. But my second use case is more controversial and I still don't know how to feel about it. I'm a graphic designer and with most enhancements in design/art technology, if you don't learn what's new, you will fall behind and your usefulness will wane. I've always been very tech savvy and positive about most new tech so I like to stay up to speed both for my job and self interest. So how do I use AI for graphic design? The things I think have the best use case and are least controversial are the AI tools that help you edit photos. In the past, I have spent loads of time editing frizzy curly hair so I can cut out a person. As of a couple years ago, Adobe I touched some tools to make that process easier, and it worked ok but it wasn't a massive time saver. Then they launched the AI assisted version and holy shit it works perfectly every time. Like give me the frizziest hair on a similar color background with texture and it will give you the perfect cutout in a minute tops. That's the kind of shit I want for AI. More tools eliminate tedious processes!! However there is another more controversial use case which is generative AI. I've played with it a lot and the tools work fantastic and get you started with images you can splice together to make what you really envisioned or you can use it to do simple things like seamlessly remove objects or add in a background that didn't exist. I once made a design with an illustrative style by inputting loads of images that fit the part, then vectorizing all the generated options and using pieces from those options to make what I really wanted. I was really proud of it especially since I'm not an illustrator and don't have the skills to illustrate what I envisioned by hand. But that's where things get controversial. I had to input the work of other people to achieve this. At the moment, I can't use anything generative commercially even though Adobe is very nonchalant about it. My company has taken a firm stance on it which is nice, but it means I can really only use that aspect for fun even though it would be very useful in some situations.

    TLDR: I use AI to give my writing style the right tone, to save loads of time editing photos, and to create images I don't have the skills to create by hand (only for funzies).

    • In Premiere it's great to generate captions. But I'm cautious since it:

      1. depends on their servers - they upload your stuff, manipulate it and bring it back;
      2. therefore it is 100% aligned with subscription model that is hell they practice for more than a dozen of years now;
      3. makes you always online and always on the latest version to keep being competitive, even if you dislike certain changes they introduced.

      In a sense, it's the missing brick in their DRM wall that ties it all together. Not their content stocks, nor their cloud stuff felt that natural of an obstacle. And while it's small now, I think they'd only make the difference between (allegedly) pirates and their always online customers bigger. Like, the next thing they'd gonna do is make healing brushes in every editor a server-only tool scrapping the pretty great local version they have now.

    • What sucks is if there was no commercial part here - i.e. like how you're doing it just for fun, or if we lived in a magical world where we all just agreed that creative works were the shared output of humanity as a whole - then there would be no problem, we'd all be free to just use what we need to make new things however we want. But there is a commercial part to it, somebody is trying to gain using the collective work of others, and that makes it unethical.

  • When I need to make a joke about how inept AI is, I'll use AI to capture an example of it saying the most efficient way to get to the moon is to put a 2 liter bottle of coke in your asshole, wide end first, remove the cap and immediately sit on an opened sleeve of mentos.

143 comments