I promise this question is asked in good faith. I do not currently see the point of generative AI and I want to understand why there’s hype. There are ethical concerns but we’ll ignore ethics for the question.
In creative works like writing or art, it feels soulless and poor quality. In programming at best it’s a shortcut to avoid deeper learning, at worst it spits out garbage code that you spend more time debugging than if you had just written it by yourself.
When I see AI ads directed towards individuals the selling point is convenience. But I would feel robbed of the human experience using AI in place of human interaction.
So what’s the point of it all?
Here’s some uses:
- skin cancer diagnoses with llms has a high success rate with a low cost. This is something that was starting to exist with older ai models, but llms do improve the success rate. source
- VLC recently unveiled a new feature of using ai to generate subtitles, i haven’t used it but if it delivers then it’s pretty nice
- for code generation, I agree it’s more harmful than useful for generating full programs or functions, but i find it quite useful as a predictive text generator, it saves a few keystrokes. Not a game changer but nice. It’s also pretty useful at generating test data so long as it’s hard to create but easy (for a human) to validate.
In the context of programming:
- Good for boilerplate code and variables naming when what you want is for the model to regurgitate things it has seen before.
- Short pieces of code where it’s much faster to verify that the code is correct than to write the code yourself.
- Sometimes, I know how to do something but I’ll wait for Copilot to give me a suggestion, and if it looks like what I had in mind, it gives me extra confidence in the correctness of my solution. If it looks different, then it’s a sign that I might want to rethink it.
- It sometimes gives me suggestions for APIs that I’m not familiar with, prompting me to look them up and learn something new (assuming they exist).
There’s also some very cool applications to game AI that I’ve seen, but this is still in the research realm and much more niche.
I have a friend with numerous mental issues who texts long barely comprehensible messages to update me on how they are doing, like no paragraphs, stream of consciousness style… and so i take those walls of text and tell chat gpt to summarize it for me, and it goes from a mess of words into an update i can actually understand and respond to.
Another use for me is getting quick access to answered id previously have to spend way more time reading and filtering over multiple forums and stack exchanges posts to answer.
Basically they are good at parsing information and reformatting it in a way that works better for me.
I treat it as a newish employee. I don’t let it do important tasks without supervision, but it does help building something rough that I can work on.
I need help getting started. I’m not an idea person. I can make anything you come up with but I can’t come up with the ideas on my own.
I’ve used it for an outline and then I rewrite it with my input.
Also, I used it to generate a basic UI for a project once. I struggle with the design part of programming so I generated a UI and then drew over the top of the images to make what I wanted.
I tried to use Figma but when you’re staring at a blank canvas it doesn’t feel any better.
I don’t think these things are worth the cost of AI ( ethically, financially, socially, environmentally, etc). Theoretically I could partner with someone who is good at that stuff or practice till I felt better about it.
I have a very good friend who is brilliant and has slogged away slowly shifting the sometimes-shitty politics of a swing state’s drug and alcohol and youth corrections policies from within. She is amazing, but she has a reading disorder and is a bit neuroatypical. Social niceties and honest emails that don’t piss her bosses or colleagues off are difficult for her. She jumped on ChatGPT to write her emails as soon is it was available, and has never looked back. It’s been a complete game changer for her. She no longer spends hours every week trying to craft emails that strike that just-right balance. She uses that time to do her job, now.
I hope it pluralizes ‘email’ like it does ‘traffic’ and not like ‘failure’.
i’ve written bots that filter things for me, or change something to machine-readable formats
the most successful thing i’ve done is have a bot that parses a web page and figures out the date/time in standard format, gets a location if it’s listed in the description and geocodes it, and a few other fields to make an ical for pretty much any page
i think the important thing is that gen ai is good at low risk tasks that reduce but don’t eliminate human effort - changing something from having to do a bunch of data entry to skimming for correctness
“at worst it spits out garbage code that you spend more time debugging than if you had just written it by yourself.”
I’ve not experienced this. Debugging for me is always faster than writing something entirely from scratch.
100% agree with this.
It is so much faster for me to give the ai the api/library documentation than it would be for me to figure out how that api works. Is it a perfect drop-in, finished piece of code? No. But that is not what I ask the ai for. I ask it for a simple example which I can then take, modify, and rework into my own code.
I generate D&D characters and NPCs with it, but that’s not really a strong argument.
For programming though it’s quite handy. Basically a smarter code completion that takes the already written stuff into account. From machine code through assembly up to higher languages, I think it’s a logical next step to be able to tell the computer, in human language, what you actually are trying to achieve. That doesn’t mean it is taking over while the programmer switches off their brain of course, but it already saved me quite some time.
I use it to sort days and create tables which is really helpful. And the other thing that really helped me and I would have never tried to figure out on my own:
I work with the open source GIS software qgis. I’m not a cartographer or a programmer but a designer. I had a world map and wanted to create geojson files for each country. So I asked chatgpt if there was a way to automate this within qgis and sure thing it recommend to create a Python script that could run in the software, to do just that and after a few tweaks it did work. that saved me a lot of time and annoyances. Would it be good to know Python? Sure but I know my brain has a really hard time with code and script. It never clicked and likely never will. So I’m very happy with this use case. Creative work could be supported in a drafting phase but I’m not so sure about this.
In creative works like writing or art, it feels soulless and poor quality. In programming at best it’s a shortcut to avoid deeper learning, at worst it spits out garbage code that you spend more time debugging than if you had just written it by yourself.
I’d actually challenge both of these. The property of “soulessness” is very subjective, and AI art has won blind competitions. On programming, it’s empirically made faster by half again, even with the intrinsic requirement for debugging.
It’s good at generating things. There are some things we want to generate. Whether we actually should, like you said, is another issue, and one that doesn’t impact anyone’s bottom line directly.
To win a competition isn’t speaking to the purpose of art really, whose purpose is for communication. AI has nothing to communicate and approximates a mish mash of its dataset to mimic to great success the things it’s seen, but is ultimately meaningless in intention. It would be a disservice to muddy the art and writing out in the world created by and for human beings with a desire to communicate with algorithmic outputs with no discernible purpose.
I feel like the indistinguishability implied by this undercuts the communicative properties of the human art, no? I suppose AI might not be able to make a coherent Banksy, but not every artist is Banksy.
If you can’t tell if something was made by Unstable or Rutkowski, isn’t it fair to say either neither work has soul (or a message), or both must?
That is only if one assumes the purpose of art is its effect on the viewer which is only one purpose. Think of your favorite work of art, fiction, music, did it make you feel connected to something, another person? Imagine a lonely individual who connected with the loneliness in a musical artist’s lyrics, what would be the purpose of that artist turned out to be an algorithm?
Banksy, maybe Rutkowski, and other artists have created a distinct language (in this case visual) that an algorithm can only replicate. Consider the fact that generative AI cannot successfully generate an image of a full glass of wine, since they’re not commonly photographed.
I do think that the technology itself is interesting for those that use it in original works that are intended to be about algorithms themselves like those surreal videos, I find those really interesting. But in the case of passing off algorithmic output as original art, like that guy who won that competition with an AI generated image, or when Spotify creates algorithmically generated music, to me that’s not art.
That reminds me of the Matrix - “You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realise? Ignorance is bliss”
Okay, so does it matter if there’s no actual human you’re connecting to, if the connection seems just as real? We’re deep into philosophy there, and I can’t reasonably expect an answer.
If that’s the whole issue, though, I can be pretty confident it won’t change the commercial realities on the ground. The artist’s studio is then destined to be something that exists only on product labels, along with scenic mixed-animal barnyards. Cypher was unusually direct about it, but comforting lies never went out of style.
That’s kind of how I’ve interpreted OP’s original question here. You could say that’s not a “legitimate” use even if inevitable, I guess, but I basically doubt anyone wants to hear my internet rando opinion on the matter, since that’s all it would be.
Consider the fact that generative AI cannot successfully generate an image of a full glass of wine, since they’re not commonly photographed.
Okay, I have to try this. @aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me a glass of wine.
There was a legitimate use case in art to draw on generative AI for concepts and a stopgap for smaller tasks that don’t need to be perfect. While art is art, not every designer out there is putting work out for a gallery - sometimes it’s just an ad for a burger.
However, as time has gone on for the industry to react I think that the business reality of generative AI currently puts it out of reach as a useful tool for artists. Profit hungry people in charge will always look to cut corners and will lack the nuance of context that a worker would have when deciding when or not to use AI in the work.
But you could provide this argument about any tool given how fucked up capitalism is. So I guess that my 2c - generative AI is a promising tool but capitalism prevents it from being truly useful anytime soon.
I like using it to help get the ball rolling on stuff and organizing my thoughts. Then I do the finer tweaking on my own. Basically I kinda use a sliding scale of the longer it takes me to refine an AI output for smaller and smaller improvements is what determines when I switch to manual.
Fake frames. Nvidia double benefits.
Note: Tis a joke, personally I think DLSS frame generation is cool, as every frame is “fake” anyway.
I have had some decent experiences with Copilot and coding in C#. I’ve asked it to help me figure out what was wrong with a LINQ query I was doing with an XDocument and it pointed me in the right direction where I figured it out. It also occasionally has some super useful auto complete blocks of code that actually match the pattern of what I’m doing.
As for art and such, sometimes people just want to see some random bizarre thing realized visually that they don’t have the ability (or time/dedication) to realize themselves and it’s not something serious that they would be commissioning an artist for anyway. I used Bing image creator recently to generate a little character portrait for an online DND game I’m playing in since I couldn’t find quite what I was looking for with an image search (which is what I usually do for those).
I’ve seen managers at my job use it to generate fun, relevant imagery for slideshows that otherwise would’ve been random boring stock images (or just text).
It has actual helpful uses, but every major corporation that has a stake in it just added to or listened to the propaganda really hard, which has caused problems for some people; like the idiot who proudly fired all of his employees because he replaced all their jobs with automation and AI, then started hunting for actual employees to hire again a couple months later because everything was terrible and nothing worked right.
They’re just tools that can potentially aid people, but they’re terrible replacements for actual people. I write automated tests for a living, and companies will always need people for that. If they fired me and the other QAs tomorrow, things would be okay for a short while thanks to the automation we’ve built, but as more and more code changes go into our numerous and labyrinthine systems, more and more bugs would get through without someone to maintain the automation.
