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?
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
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.
People keep meaning different things when they say “Generative AI”. Do you mean the tech in general, or the corporate AI that companies overhype and try to sell to everyone?
The tech itself is pretty cool. GenAI is already being used for quick subtitling and translating any form of media quickly. Image AI is really good at upscaling low-res images and making them clearer by filling in the gaps. Chatbots are fallible but they’re still really good for specific things like generating testing data or quickly helping you in basic tasks that might have you searching for 5 minutes. AI is huge in video games for upscaling tech like DLSS which can boost performance by running the game at a low resolution then upscaling it, the result is genuinely great. It’s also used to de-noise raytracing and show cleaner reflections.
Also people are missing the point on why AI is being invested in so much. No, I don’t think “AGI” is coming any time soon, but the reason they’re sucking in so much money is because of what it could be in 5 years. Saying AI is a waste of effort is like saying 3D video games are a waste of time because they looked bad in 1995. It will improve.
AI is huge in video games for upscaling tech like DLSS which can boost performance by running the game at a low resolution then upscaling it, the result is genuinely great
frame gen is blurry af and eats shit on any fast motion. rendering games at 640x480 and then scaling them to sensible resolutions is horrible artistic practice.
rendering games at 640x480 and then scaling them to sensible resolutions is horrible artistic practice.
Is that a reason a lot of pixel art games are looking like shit? I remember the era of 320x240 and 640x480 and the modern pixel art are looking noticeably worse.
that’s probably more to do with a lack of dithering and not using tubes anymore. lots of those older games looked better on crt than they do on digital
a good example is dracula’s eyes in symphony of the night, on crt the red bleeds over giving a really good red eyes effect
on lcd they are just single red pixels and look awful
Quite possibly, old games also look worse on emus (and don’t even let me start about those remasters, i got incredibly hyped for incoming Suikoden 1+2 on PC but my eyes fucking bleed).
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 wrote guidelines for my small business. Then I uploaded the file to chatgpt and asked it to review it.
It made legitimately good suggestions and rewrote the documents using better sounding English.
Because of chatgpt I will be introducing more wellness and development programs.
Additionally, I need med images for my website. So instead of using stock photos, I was able to use midjourney to generate a whole bunch of images in the same style that fit the theme of my business. It looks much better.
I think genAI would be pretty neat for
bit banging testsfuzzing, aka. Throwing semi-random requests and/or signals at some device in the hopes of finding obscure edge-cases or security holes.Fuzzing.
Thank you for the correction.
I use it for coding, mostly as a time saver. Generally as I’m typing, it will give a suggestion that’s functionally the same as what I was going to type anyway so I hit tab and go to the next line. It’s able to do this accurately for around 80% of the total lines that I’m writing and going from writing full lines to writing 0-3 characters + tab on most of those lines makes a massive speed difference. It’s especially great for writing one off scripts when I’m doing something that’s not even a coding project, but there’s some tedious file juggling involved. Writing a script completely by hand for that often would take slightly longer than just doing the task manually, and as I said, it’s a one-off. But writing the script with copilot often takes as little as 10% of the time which is really nice.
Even in cases where I don’t already know how to solve a problem (particularly a problem involving specific integrations) it can often be faster to ask it how to solve the problem and then look up the specific functions, endpoints, etc it uses in the docs rather than trying to find those doc entries directly with a search. And if it hallucinates a function that doesn’t exist in the docs then I tell it that and it often successfully corrects itself. When it fails more than once I’ve generally found that there’s a high probability that the SDK/API/etc I’m looking at doesn’t have anything that does what I need so it’s time for me to start rethinking my approach
Outside of coding, I also use stable diffusion to generate images of D&D characters I’m creating instead of image searching and settling for something kind of close to what I was picturing.
I also regularly use SD when I stumble upon some art I’d like to use as a desktop wallpaper, but can’t find at high enough resolution. I just upscale it and proceed. Sometimes I’ll have something at the wrong aspect ratio and use generative fill to extend the edges of the image to the desired aspect ratio, those parts of the image are nothing special, but the important part is the original image and I just need some filler to prevent it from abruptly ending before the edges of the screen.
One last case is if I need to put together a tediously long document, I generally find that having it generate a first draft with the right structure and then iterating a bunch on that comes more easily than starting with an empty page.
Programming quick scripts and replacement for Google/Wikipedia more than anything. I chat to it on an app to ask about various facts or info I wanted to know. And it usually gets in depth pretty quickly.
Also cooking. I’ve basically given up on recipe sites, except for niche, specific things. AI gets stuff relatively right and quickly adjusts if I need substitutions. (And again, hands free for my sticky flour fingers).
And ideation. Whether I’m coming up with names, or a specific word, or clothes, or a joke, I can ask AI for 50 examples and I can usually piece together a result I like from a couple of those.
Finally, I’ll admit I use it as a sounding board to think through topics, when a real human who can empathise would absolutely be better. Sadly, the way modern life is, one isn’t always available. It’s a small step up from ELIZA.
The key is that AI is part of the process. Just as I would never say “trust the first Google result with your life”, because its some internet rando who might say anything, so too should you not let AI have the final word. I frequently question or correct it, but it still helps the journey.
It’s kinda handy if you don’t want to take the time to write a boring email to your insurance or whatever.
I sorta disagree though, based on my experience with llms.
The email it generates will need to be read carefully and probably edited to make sure it conveys your point accurately. Especially if it’s related to something as serious as insurance.
If you already have to specifically create the prompt, then scrutinize and edit the output, you might as well have just written the damn email yourself.
It seems only useful to write slop that doesn’t matter that only gets consumed by other machines and dutifully logged away in a slop container.
It does sort of solve the ‘blank page problem’ though IMO. It sometimes takes me ages to start something like a boring insurance letter because I open up LibreOffice and the blank page just makes me want to give up. If I have AI just fart out a letter and then I start to edit it, I’m already mid-project so it actually does save me some time in that way.
I agree. By the time I’m done, I’ve written most of the document. It gets me past the part where I procrastinate because I don’t know how to begin.
For us who are bad at writing though that’s exactly why we use it. I’m bad with greetings, structure, things that people expect and I’ve had people get offended at my emails because they come off as rude. I don’t notice those things. For that llms have been a godsend. Yes, I of course have to validate it, but it conveys the message I’m trying to usually
Yeah that’s how I use it, essentially as an office intern. I get it to write cover letters and all the other mindless piddly crap I don’t want to do so I can free up some time to do creative things or read a book or whatever. I think it has some legit utility in that regard.
I get the point here but I think it’s the wrong approach. If you feel the email needs too much business fluff, just write it more casual and get to the point quicker.
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 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.
shitposting.
Need some weidly specific imagery about whatever you’re going on about? It got you covered
I use it to help with programming and writing. Not as a way to have something so it for me but as something that can show me how to do something I am stuck on or give me ideas when Im drawing a blank.
Kinda like an interactive rubber duck. Its solutions arent always right or accurate but it does help me get past things I struggle with.
Money. It’s always about money. But more seriously, I also wonder what’s the point since all my interactions with GenAI have been disappointment after disappointment. But I read Dev saying that it’s great at creating drafts
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.
