I'm going to continue to monitor this thread but so far I'm surprised at how little use most are getting from AI tools. And the highest upvoted comment is that one does NOT use AI tools in their daily routine.
So much hype around AI recently and I'm not seeing/hearing a lot of REAL, PRACTICAL use case for it.
I don’t use it for daily tasks. I’ve been tinkering around with local LLMs for recreation. Roleplay, being my dungeon master in a text adventure. Telling it to be my “waifu”. Or generating amateur short stories. At some time I’d like to practice my foreign language skills with it.
I haven’t had good success with tasks that rely on “correctness” or factual information. However sometimes I have it draft an email for me or come up with an argumentation for a text that I’m writing. That happens every other week, not daily. And I generously edit and restructure it afterwards or just incorporate some of the paragraphs into my final result.
D&D related things actually seems like a decent use case. For most other things I don’t understand how people find it useful enough to find use cases to do daily tasks with it.
Agree. I’ve tried some of the use-cases that other people mentioned here. Like summarization, “online” search, tech troubleshooting, recipes, … And all I’ve had were sub-par results and things that needed extensive fact-checking and reworking. So I can’t really relate to those experiences. I wouldn’t use AI as of now for tasks like that.
And this is how I ended up with fiction and roleplay. Seems to be better suited for that. And somehow AI can do small coding tasks. Like writing boiler-plate code and help with some of the more tedious tasks. At some point I need to feed another of my real-life problems to the current version of ChatGPT but I don’t think it’ll do it for me. And it can come up with nice ideas for stories. Unguided storywriting will get dull in my experience. I guess the roleplaying is nice, though.
Edit: And I forgot about translation. That also works great with AI.
I don’t like the idea of wasting energy on inefficient things so I don’t use “AI”.
A.I. use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which A.I. runs.
I once used AI to make a mock up of a t shirt design I had in my head just for curiosity, it made exactly what I wanted and now I don’t feel like it’s my design anymore. Who knows what artists it took from. Even after redrawing I lost appreciation for it. Haven’t touch AI since minus some bored conversations with dead celebrity models.
I don’t trust the search results to be accurate, its desire to please the user makes it unreliable. When it comes to image generation it takes from artists. AI is great for menial time consuming tasks like say cropping out the background of an image for example but because of the reasons above I don’t tend to use it all that much, and my respect for it is quite low.
I work as a research economist and use half a model zoo and APIs regularly and have even written a small R package to work with LLM Apis. ChatGPT Pro in the interface for programming questions (helping me to write or document my R code, for example I have used it to easily translate tax laws into R functions to make microsimulations [of course i double check them]). Anthropic’s or Groq’s API’s to process large amounts of documents fast (for examples creating JSON-lists about papers to make them more easily searchable). I have one small script that has many useful prompts that really helps me to rephrase texts (e.g. “Please rephrase this paragraph to be more clear and concise. Give me {n} Versions. {paragrph}”) , which I have included into my browser. I used Stable Diffusion to generate images for my Christmas Cards.
As an SEO - hell no. Those that did got penalized by the latest algorithm update from Google.
As a DM? Yes! It helped me write a nice poem for a bard that will hopefully give my players some context to what they will be encountering as they move further in my campaign.
I swap over from GPT4 to Perplexity Pro. It’s almost taken over as my default search now. I use that to troubleshoot home assistant issues, or even game mods issues. The pro version is nice because they will actually ask you to clarify certain things before giving a better output.
It performs wells with all the usual email reply, writing etc. I do like that I have the option to switch between GPT, Claude, and Mistral within Perplexity, which the last actually will return results if I ask for help on stuff like torrents.
I occasionally use ChatGPT, I don't find it that useful though. I mostly use it to summarize long text, etc. I also like Phind, which can be used without creating an account. I would never pay for AI.
I’m a professional software dev and I use GitHub Copilot.
It’s most useful for repetitive or boilerplate code where it has an existing pattern it can copy. It basically saves me some typing and little typo errors that can creep in when writing that type of code by hand.
It’s less useful for generating novel code. Occasionally it can help with known algorithms or obvious code constructs that can be inferred from the context. Prompting it with code comments can help although it still has a tendency to hallucinate about APIs that don’t exist.
I think it will improve with time. Both the models themselves and the tools integrating the models with IDEs etc.
I used Copilot for a while (in a Rust codebase fwiw) and it was… both useful and not for me? Its best suggestions came with some of the short-but-tedious completions like path().unwrap().to_str().into() etc. Those in and of themselves could be hit-or-miss, but useful often enough that I might as well take the suggestion and then see if it compiles.
Anything longer than that was OK sometimes, but often it’d be suggesting code for an older version of a particular API, or just trying to write a little algorithm for something I didn’t want to do in the first place. It was still correct often enough when filling out particular structures to be technically useful, but leaning on it more I noticed that my code was starting to bloat with things I really should have pulled off into another function instead of autocompleting a particular structure every time. And that’s on me, but I stopped using copilot because it just got too easy for me to write repetitive code but with like a 25% chance of needing to correct something in the suggestion, which is an interrupt my ADHD ass doesn’t need.
So whether it’s helpful for you is probably down to how you work/think/write code. I’m interested to see how it improves, but right now it’s too much of a nuisance for me to justify.
Ollama running the dolphin-mistrial. Its been neat using it with the continue plugin in vscode, nothing life changing though. I think with further embeddings and RAG over curated data sources would go a long way to make it more useful for me.
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