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.
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.
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
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.
Its great for documentation like APIs and it really makes a difference
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“.
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.
It can be such a different experience editing/touching something up rather than having to create it wholesale where it can often take on a life of its own and takes so much more time
I like to make karaoke tracks of music I like using an AI vocal remover. Other than that, no.
Results do vary, but if we’re talking that universal vocal remover, it definitely seems to be a competent enough program.
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 use it for coding (rarely pure copy paste), explaining code, use/examples, finding tools to use. Better translation than Google translate for Japanese. Asking for things that search engines only gives generic results for.
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.
I abhor it and I think anybody who does actually like it is using it unethically: for art (which they intend to profit off of), for writing papers or articles, and for writing bad code.
I think that you’re right, with the way that our society is structured, it is unethical. It’s essentially the world’s most advanced plagiarism tool.
However, being realistic, even if no private individual ever used it, it would still exist and would be used by corporations for profit maximising.
In my opinion, telling people that they’re bad people for using something which is made unethically isn’t really helpful. For example, smartphones aren’t made ethically, but the way to get that to change isn’t to change consumer habits - because we know that just doesn’t work - it’s to get organised, as a collective working class, and take action into our own hands.
Corpos are currently shooting themselves in the foot by trying to sell an essentially useless product which only lowers the quality of everything it touches.
I’m sure someday it will replace the press number phone machines, at the cost of accessibility, but otherwise I cannot imagine it “maximising profits”.
Can you seriously not imagine how a corporation could benefit from generative AI, or are you just being obstinate and saying it’s useless because you think it’s unethical and you hope that by saying it’s useless that you can effectively manifest that?
Because there are plenty of use-cases for generative AI. None of them have to be good, or even products. Your phone machine example is a good one - it’s not a product, really, it’s taking the role of a human to fulfil some obligation, or to intentionally make it harder for people to add to the company’s support burden.
I think there are some useful applications for generative AI, but I do agree that the incarnations we have are unethical. And again, I really don’t think that simply telling people that they’re bad people for using it is going to win them over to your side.
Tech bros getting mad that their bullshit machine isn’t the future, cry more. I’m not here to convince you and we’re not intellectual equals.
Fair enough, thank you for your time.
Totally second the latter part - it’s the self destructive nature of being blindly anti-AI. Pretty much everyone would support giving more rights and benefits to people displaced by AI, but only a fraction of that group would support an anti-AI mentality. If you want to work against the negative effects of AI in a way that can actually change things, the solution is not to push against the wall closing in on you, but to find the escape.
I use it when I get stoned with my mates and think of funny shit to generate.
You missed the button to reply to OP and instead replied to somebody who didn’t ask.
Why would you even comment if you don’t want to participate in a discussion?
Is this discussion? I added my answer onto the pile for OP’s question. I said I dislike a thing and everyone who uses it, never at any point expressing any uncertainty or confusion on the matter. Then user b said they use it and explained how. If anything they seemed to want to be insulted, and in that sense I was quite nice about it.
Clearly, their intent was to provide an example of a relatively harmless use of AI as a way of demonstrating to you that your position may have been a bit reductive.
Your reaction, of behaving like, lets be honest, a bit of an asshole, wasn’t really warranted.
I tried really hard not to engage with this obvious bait but I guess you really want it.
If you require AI to be amused while high then congratulations you’re the most disgruntled creature on the face of this earth. Too bad you’re still paying for a business sampling works without permission or accrediting authors.
Shit counterpoint by a shit person.
First of all, most AI tools have some free tier. I doubt the other commenter paid a penny.
Also, just because they did it, it doesn’t mean they “required” it… I’ve laughed at cat videos before, that doesn’t mean that I require cat videos to be amused.
I meant to reply to you, to illustrate it’s not always unethical; a point you raised, not OP.
It is always unethical and I made it very clear that people like you are people I dislike, so stop trolling and ragebait elsewhere.
I’m not trolling. Why is it unethical for me and my buddies to generate images of a duck with the head of an elephant?
For the sake of brevity, I’m just going to agree that I’m sea-lioning.
Now, explain how what I’m doing is unethical.
Do you think it’s unethical because it uses stolen art?
If so, I don’t think there’s an issue because I’m not publishing anything I generate.
Do you think it’s unethical because of the electricity usage?
If so, you could make the argument about any frivilous activity which generates electricity.
I really don’t know of a compelling reason besides these two which raises a red flag for you.
My corp has been very skeptical and suspicious. So far the only allowed ai is to summarize slack. For channels that I want to keep in the loop but not waste time monitoring, it creates a nice summary of recent traffic.
I was trying to help one guy who used an online ai despite it being against policy. However he was just using it as a search engine to find a code solution and it took way too long to give him the wrong answer. A search engine would have been faster but he’d have to use his own judgement to identify the wrong answer. Pretty arrogant guy despite not knowing what he was doing, so I didn’t fight it when he insisted he was going to follow what it told him
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.
It’s great for parsing through the enshittified journalism.
It’s ironic that GenAI is great for solving a problem it caused. It’s like hiring a gangster to take you through gangster-controlled territory.
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.
because of the way it’s trained on internet data, large models like ChatGPT can actually work pretty well as a sort of first-line search engine. My girlfriend uses it like that all the time especially for obscure stuff in one of her legal classes, it can bring up the right details to point you towards googling the correct document rather than muddling through really shitty library case page searches.
especially when you use something with inline citations like bing
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.
