I don't. Played with it a bit but as a capable writer and coder I don't find it fills a need and just shifts the effort from composition (which I enjoy) to editing and review (which I don't).
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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Mostly the same. I tried ChatGPT a few times to get it to generate some code, but mostly it produced code that didn't even compile and when I asked it to fix it, it created code that didn't compile in a different way. I enjoy writing code on my own a lot more than having to review some pre-generated code.
Though I use it as a glorified Google sometimes and that is not even so bad.
Not much. I totally agree with Linus Torvalds in that AIs are just overhyped autocorrects on steroids, and I despise that the artwork generators are all based on theft.
Pretty much all I use them for is to make my life easier at work, like turning a quick draft into a formal email.
The LLMs for text are also based on "theft". They're just much better at hiding it because they have a multitude more source material. Still, it does sometimes happen that they quote a source article verbatim.
But yeah basically they're just really good copy/paste engines that work with statistical analysis to determine the most likely answer based on what's written in basically the whole internet :P It's a bit hard to explain sometimes to people who think that the AI really "thinks". I always say: If that were the case, why is the response to a really complicated question just as fast as a simple one? The wait is just based on the length of the output.
In terms of the "theft" I think it's similar ethically to google cache though.
It's a bit hard to explain sometimes to people who think that the AI really “thinks”
If I had the patience, I'd try to explain the Chinese Room though experiment to the people that misunderstand AIs. But I don't, so I usually just shut up 🙂
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I despise that the artwork generators are all based on theft.
Ownership of anything is difficult to define. The internet has accelerated this loosening of definition. If I pay a subscription to use my coffee pot, do I really own it? If I take a picture of the coffee pot, do I own the picture? If I pay a photographer to take a picture of the pot do I own the picture, do I own their time?
I don't intend on trying changing your opinion on theft, but its interesting to think about how ownership feels very different as time goes by.
If ownership doesn't exist, then piracy doesn't exist. Can't steal that which is not owned. Of course companies don't like that and consider it "not theft" if they're doing the stealing.
I totally agree with Linus Torvalds in that AIs are just overhyped autocorrects on steroids
Did he say that? I hope he didn't mean all kinds of AI. While "overhyped autocorrect on steroids" might be a funny way to describe sequence predictors / generators like transformer models, recurrent neural networks or some reinforcement learning type AIs, it's not so true for classificators, like the classic feed-forward network (which are part of the building blocks of transformers, btw), or convolutional neural networks, or unsupervised learning methods like clustering algorithms or principal component analysis. Then there are evolutionary algorithms and there are reasoning AIs like bayesan nets and so much much much more different kinds of ML/AI models and algorithms.
It would just show a vast lack of understanding if someone would judge an entire discipline that simply.
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I don't and the energy consumption of public AI services is a stopper for "testing and playing around". I think I'll just wait until it takes over the world as advertised.
I would argue they already have. Just as cars used to be slow, inefficient, and loud, compared to today. Overtime their will inevitably be improvements in how they run, but also improvements in dedicated hardware support. Timeline wise, we are enjoying the hot new Model T, knowing eventually we will get to have a modern Honda Civic.
Nope, nothing. There doesn't honestly seem to be anything I'd use it for, even then I wouldn't wanna support it as long as it uses Data its gotten by basically stealing. Maybe once that has gotten better I'll look more into it, but at the current moment I just don't have the heart to support it
Copying is not stealing. It's corporate propaganda conflating the two.
It is stealing lots of potential work and income from professional creatives, though.
Improvements in technology do not guarantee employment for tradespeople of current technology. A whole lot of horses became unemployed when cars became ubiquitous. I'd say the improvement of cars to society is worth the loss of employment to all those who maintained the horse's infrastructure. Like all those manufacturing jobs lost from the improvement in machines, professional creatives must adapt to the times, or seek other forms of work. No different than any other job in all of history.
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They take what we make, be it art or Text without our or anyones consent, to me thats stealing something. And yes, there are AI Tools fully build on public Domain and open source things, but those are at the moment, few and far between.
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Summarising articles / extracting information / transforming it according to my needs. Everyone knows LLM-bssed summaries are great, but not many folks utilise them to their full extent. For instance, yesterday, Sony published a blog piece on how a bunch of games were discounted on the PlayStation store. This was like a really long list that I couldn't be bothered reading, so I asked ChatGPT to display just the genres that I'm interested in, and sort them according to popularity. Another example is parsing changelogs for software releases, sometimes some of them are really long (and not sorted properly - maybe just a dump of commit messages), so I'd ask it to summarise the changes, maybe only show me new feature additions, or any breaking changes etc.
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Translations. I find ChatGPT excellent at translating Asian languages - expecially all the esoteric terms used in badly-translated Chinese webcomics. I feed in the pinyin word and provide context, and ChatGPT tells me what it means in that context, and also provides alternate translations. This is a 100 times better than just using Google Translate or whatever dumb dictionary-based translator, because context is everything in Asian languages.
Oh that reminds me of another use of it last year. I let it translate some official divorce papers from Korean to German and then let a human read through it and give it a stamp of approval. Payed $5 for the stamp instead $70 for the translation.
I find that LLM powered autocomplete when programming makes me more productive.
Occasionally I'll use a chatbot to help me reword an email or other text, though this is rare.
Naming things in programming is a solved problem now. You can just name it Thingy, and then ask Copilot Chat what it should be called when you're done implementing it
I'm not a programmer but I work with IT and I regularly need complex shell scripts. ChatGPT has enabled me to skip the largest portion of slamming my head against the wall by writing the script for me and then I can tune it if it gets something wrong. Saves me hours and hours of my life.
and porn
I use it to generate code documentation because I'm incapable of documenting things without sounding like a condescending ass. Paste in a function, tell it to produce docstrings and doctests, then edit the hell out of it to sound more human and use actual data in the tests.
Its also great for readmes. I have a template that I follow for that and only work on one section at a time.
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I find them neat, but there's just too many issues I can't overlook.
The environmental impact of these technologies is immense, and growing exponentially.
A vast amount of the training data used for the big llms and image generators is not in the public domain, which is at best ethically grey but at worst just blatantly exploiting artists and other professionals.
If there existed some alternatives to the big names that avoided both of these issues, I'd love to use them for code autocomplete and image generation for ttrpgs, but as it stands the moral cost is too high.
porn
Dito, although probably not in the same way you mean :D I've actually noticed that I respond stronger to erotic short stories than straight up videos or images, so I use AI for basically erotic fantasy chatting. Some of them can actually generate images to show surroundings or chars during conversations and weave them into the chat.
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I love that the top comments are all "I don't", as if that's helpful in any way.
I’ve used it to tweak a speech I was writing to make it more appropriate to my intended audience….
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Mostly for finding information that for whatever reason can be difficult to find using search engines. For example, I've used ChatGPT to ask spoiler-free questions about plot points in books I'm reading, which has worked rather well. It hasn't spoiled me yet, but rather tells me that giving more information would be a spoiler.
Last time I tried to look something up on Google, carefully, I got a massive spoiler for the end of the entire book series.
I also use it for code-related questions at times, but very rarely, and mostly when using a language I'm not used to. Such as when I wrote an expect script for the first (and perhaps only) time recently.
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I use Stable Diffusion to make character portraits and scenes for my D&D game that I run in Foundry. Better than trying to scrounge Google images!
I've found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I've had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.
You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party's next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn't ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.
You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are 'bioluminescent' - little tells like that which show it's AI generated.
Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it's just a tool, don't think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it's only as helpful as how you try to use it.
I use it all the time to write Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerApps formulas. I use it to draft and re-write e-mails. I use it to come up with ideas and brainstorm.
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I find a ton of uses for quick Python scripts hammered out with Bing Chat to get random stuff done.
It's also super useful when brainstorming and fleshing out stuff for the tabletop roleplaying games I run. Just bounce ideas off it, have it write monologues, etc.
There is no AI. But I regularly use data, machine learning, statistics, and other math for just about everything.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/there-is-no-ai
@jeena I only use DeepL to translate and that's it. I also started taking notes in .md files, so that could make for a good use case in the future if there was an AI that I could use without connecting to the internet (e.g. to only let me tell stuff based on the files I got). Otherwise I am pretty reticent on AI. Perhaps I watched too many fiction movies, but I am afraid it will become too sentient and somehow escape the human oversight, thus creating havoc in our lives.
Check out llama3 which you can run locally.
The only practical thing I have found I can do with AI is brainstorm ideas (or rather expand upon little ideas I have but don't know where to go after) or figure out what's wrong with a snippet of code when I can't figure it out on my own.
I’ve found it useful for getting approaches to programming projects. Rarely does it completely solve my problems, but it keeps me headed in the right direction.
I’m also partway through making my first ARG and it’s super useful for generating ideas, especially when I feed it my established lore because it can keep ideas within that universe.
I’ve found overall, it’s best to use it to fill in the gaps on ideas I have in general. I theoretically could make all of the content myself from scratch, but I’m honestly terrible at all the little details in many cases. It allows me to not dwell on the little stuff.
I use it quite a bit. I don’t trust big companies who commercialize AI so I run my AIs locally on my old retired gaming desktop that I’ve turned into a homelab/media server.
I use Kobold.AI to self host an LLM like ChatGPT (Dolphin-Mistral7b if you are curious). I mainly use it for low effort knowledge searches for stuff that is easier typed out long and descriptive (since google struggles with this). Since it’s AI I have to be careful about what I search since I’ve seen it make stuff up but for the majority of what I use it for (Programming syntax, Linux troubleshooting, general questions) it’s pretty good.
I also have Stable Diffusion running as well using the ICBINP model (which is pretty decent for photorealistic images). I use this AI to generate social media display pictures and porn :) it’s fun because it’s a surprise at what you’re going to get but sometimes it generates absolute horrors. Anatomical horrors. Those are genuinely horrific. Other times it’s really good.
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Enhanced googling
I pretty much only use it for brainstorming ideas.
- Improved autocomplete when programming
- Recommendations for third party packages or protocols for programming or letting it list details for them, or comparing two competing implementations
- Hints for my TTRPG stories (not so great for that, because it always uses very similar ideas)
- Helping recalling a word I forgot by simply describing what I mean, same with phrases or proverbs
A lot of translation and summarisation. ChatGPT is extremely good in absorbing a whole mix of comments in different languages and summarising them in English (or whatever other language).
For programming I don't use it so much anymore because it hallucinates too much, calling APIs that don't even exist. And when I lower the temperature the output is too sparse.
I'm also trying to build an assistant that can also communicate proactively (I intend to auto-prompt it when things happen and then evaluate if it should cause a message to me). But I need to get a local LLM going for that because running that through the ChatGPT API will be too costly.
Also, a replacement for some of my web searches. Sometimes I just want to know something and it's refreshing that it can give me an answer (even though it does need to be validated, it's much easier to do that when you know what you're looking for!)
Out of say a year, I have used it once to help put a work quote into better formatting, the rest of the time I use it solely as a way to suggest films I would enjoy based on a previously warched list, it is actually good at that
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I've used it to make specific images for work proposals that stock sources may not have. Sometimes for fun, I vary it so it's in the style of a cartoon or a Japanese woodcut.
Only use deep learning ai with deepl translations and for some text annotation project I did for uni.
I've found it helpful at work for things like preparing agendas for meetings, or creating an outline of a presentation or document I need to write.
I've also found it helpful when I'm trying to Google something where I need to be pretty specific and then I can't find exactly what I mean by searching.
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